Music Sin Fronteras – Jaramar Soto

Dream jazz in Guadalajara with Jaramar

Jaramar Soto – or just plain Jaramar – is a force of musical nature. Sixteen albums, more singles than I can count, a Latin Grammy, world tours. Concerts in world famous theaters. She performs in classical, jazz, blues, medieval, folk, world – so many genres that she is not classifiable. She sings in the “Jaramar Space”, a special space in music that she made her own almost 20 years ago with her first album.

But not content with one of the most amazing careers an artist can hope for, she is once again redefining “Jaramar Space” and maybe a part of jazz itself.

Saturday night at the Teatro Vivian Blumenthal in Guadalajara, she performed with her jazz trio, Caída Libre (Free Fall) with bassist Eliud Ernandes, guitarist Daniel Lopez, and, of course, Jaramar. But, as always with Jaramar, this was not just another jazz group, she introduced us to what I call “Dream Jazz”.

Like “dream pop” by artists such as Whitney Tai, My Bloody Valentine, or Mazzy Star, dream jazz in Jaramar’s hands emphasizes atmosphere and texture along with melody, mesmerizing us with dreamy vocals and immersive sound. Unlike “dream pop” – or really anything else – Saturday night Jaramar created the immersive sound with her vocals, scaffolded by the ethereal fireworks of Lopez’s guitar and the landscape of Ernandes’s double bass an classical guitar. With a seemingly impossible range she moved from breathy to operatic, to gut-grabbing in English, Spanish and French. And every song took us to a place we had never experienced before, even with songs we knew well– it took us to “Jaramar Space”.

She introduced her “dream” approach to jazz (and blues and wee bit of rock) with Gershwin, Monk, Rodgers and Hart, Garner and Burke, U2, Brel, Leonard Cohen, Willy Nelson, Gainsbourg, Piaf, Agustín Lara, José Alfredo Jimenez, and her own original compositions. Each was hypnotic as her voice soared and whispered. Her version of “Strange Fruit” made me cry.

The audience knew something unusual was going to happen when, at a jazz concert, she opened with “Red River Valley” and made it her own as her vocals captured us in a way this classic song of the West has never done – it was in “Jaramar Space”, dream jazz. She did the same with Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”, “ the Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, U2’s “Love is Blindness”, Mercer and Mancini’s “Moon River”, and the classic jazz piece, Hannigan’s and Monk’s “Round Midnight”. Almost 2 hours non-stop of immersion in her musical world, her “space”.

In a conversation after the show, she told me that she is working on a double album, and she has concerts booked in Mexico City, all of which should give her plenty of space to further explore dream jazz if she wants to, which I hope she does.

Unfortunately, there was no video crew at the Teatro Vivian Blumenthal concert, so I took two videos which are on my YouTube channel. Hopefully there will be more. In the meantime, check out Jaramar on Spotify for a taste of “Jaramar Space”.