La Pasionaria

£13.00

Valentina in colaboration with Mr McFall’s Chamber. Women are at the heart of this disc – warm-hearted South American mothers, women on the town, little girls hanging scared on their mothers’ coat tails, blondes kissing fruit sellers in the Buenos Aires rain, heroic activists from the Associationf Families of the Disappeared, women flirting, dancing, taking their men to task, looking for love – mothers, daughters, lovers. Displacement is also at the heart of this disc, both in the sense of exile and in the sense of losing ones way. Many of Valentina Montoya Martínez’s songs on this disc spring out of her particular experiences growing up as an exile here in the UK. She arrived in London one dreary winter’s day as a young child with her family fleeing the terrifying violence of Pinochet’s Chile. Her father stayed behind and was imprisoned and tortured in the infamous Chacabuco concentration camp in the northern desert. Growing up with her mother in Birmingham, Valentina’s family home was a refuge of South American culture and friendship. She grew up listening to Chilean singer/songwriters such as Víctor Jara, Isabel Parra, the Argentine Mercedes Sosa and the Uruguayans José Carbajal (“El Sabalero”) and Alfredo Zitarrosa and others in the Nueva Canción tradition. Valentina also grew up listening to tango – especially tango songs, of which her mother had a great many recordings. She herself became a singer of a wide range of Latin American folk music.

Description

La Pasionaria – with Mr McFall’s Chamber Valentina sings her own tango songs alongside Piazzolla’s modern tangos, with Mr McFall’s Chamber. Her songs were written over a number of years and pay homage to people she has known and admired, strong women and her own mother, to whom it is dedicated. Featuring a song for Sola Sierra, an outstanding Chilean human rights activist, and one for an English poet who encouraged and believed in her as a young child, this CD is a heartfelt manifestation of admiration and love for those people that have inspired and led the way for her.  

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