Josephine Foster's voice is an especially distinctive instrument, one that can somehow sound less timeless than vintage, as though it might be best heard through the speaker of an old hand-crank Victrola. Over the course of her career, she has applied her quavering soprano to an impressively broad array of styles that has included rustic folk, spiky acid rock, German lieder, and a musical setting of Emily Dickinson poems. On Anda Jaleo, recorded live in the Grenadine Sierra with the Victor Herrero Band, she returns to more traditional material. The album features songs from poet Federico Garcia Lorca's folk collection Las Canciones Populares Espanolas. And for better or worse, Foster and her group have taken a conservative, almost reverential approach to this material, resulting in an album that goes exactly as far as its premise might suggest and no further.
As genre exercises go, however, Anda Jaleo is extremely well-executed. Drawing inspiration from Lorca's own 1931 recordings with the flamenco singer/dancer La Argentinita, these performances are spirited and infectious, with Foster's voice perfectly framed by the sound of acoustic guitars, castanets, handclaps, and dancing feet. The album's humble production suits her well, and on such tracks as the mournful "Las Morillas de Jaen" there's little to indicate that these are modern recordings rather than some antique 78-rpm discs.
While Garcia Lorca's work was closely informed by his friendships and collaborations with surrealists Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and other contemporary modernists, his poetry was also heavily steeped in traditional Spanish culture. These traditions are directly reflected in the songs he collected for Las Canciones, whose lyrics are filled with references to Moorish girls, gypsies, bullfighters, and Spanish geography. The songbook was suppressed during Franco's dictatorship, despite the fact that the songs contain few if any overt political references. (Although during the Spanish Civil War the lyrics to songs such as "Anda Jaleo" were occasionally altered to reflect anti-Franco sentiment.)
The album's stylish package includes song lyrics in both Spanish and English translation, and though the songs may not be directly political, nearly every song in the collection seems to carry fragments of loss and mystery. Foster and Herrero prove themselves expert at mining the songbook's wealth of emotion, be it in the high-spirited drive of "Los Cuatro Muleros" or in the half-sung, half-spoken "Los Mozos de Monleon", an enigmatic tale of death in the bullring. The album is at its best during its quietest moments, as on "Los Reyes De La Baraja" ("The Kings of the Cards") which is a delicate duet between Foster's voice and Herrero's exquisite acoustic guitar, or the closing a cappella lullaby "Nana De Sevilla".
As lovely as Anda Jaleo can sound, there are points at which one can't help but wish that the group had chosen to be more daring in their arrangements. The original recordings of Lorca and La Argentinita are still readily available and are quite worth hearing. In several instances here, the group's arrangements simply substitute acoustic guitar for Lorca's piano, resulting in performances that do little to improve upon the originals. Foster and Herrero do deserve credit for bringing further attention to Lorca's songbook, and hopefully they can find a way in the future to integrate these regional traditions into some of the other idioms that Foster has already practiced.
