Lágrima Ríos: recovering the lost Paris sessions of an Afro-Latin tango icon

The black pearl of tango. This is how the legendary Afro-Uruguayan singer Lágrima Ríos (1924-2006) was known. Despite tango’s African roots (it is argued that the word ‘tango’ has an African origin), Lágrima was one of the only artists of African descent ever to find fame in the style.

Born Lida Melba Benavídez Tabárez, Lágrima had a poor childhood. She grew up in the Barrio Sur neighbourhood of Montevideo, where she lived in a conventillo (a huge house with more than 50 rooms, where entire families lived, crammed together). There, immigrants from Italy, Poland and Spain, alongside people of African descent, lived side by side.

Although she did not know the exact origins of her ancestors, she knew that her great-grandmother bore the marks of shackles on her wrists and ankles. “They were sold to the highest bidder, and the landowners took them to their large estates to do the heaviest work. She lived through that era… and she used to sing,” she recounted in the book Café de los Maestros (2006).

The first songs Lágrima learned were in Yiddish, but she soon discovered tangos by Ignacio Corsini and became fascinated with folk rhythms like milonga. She also worked as a cook for a cultural attaché at the US Embassy, where she was introduced to blues and jazz.

She began singing in her teens, joining the trio of tango guitarist Alberto Mastra in 1943. Ríos suggested it was when Mastra gave her the artistic name of Lágrima Ríos in 1950 that her breakthrough came. Lágrima soon incorporated candombe, a Montevideo rhythm of Afro-descendant origin, into her repertoire.

In 1972, she belatedly released her first solo album, La Perla Negra del Tango, a true masterpiece, beloved by music lovers and collectors alike. In the last years of her life, she was part of Café de los Maestros, a Buena Vista Social Club-style project with selected tango artists, produced by the multi-award-winning Gustavo Santaolalla and Gustavo Mozzi.

But this story takes place in 2002, when Lágrima was on a European tour. In Paris, she sang at a tango festival and at the prestigious Sorbonne University. While there, she proposed to her friend Carlos ‘Pájaro’ Canzani (a renowned Uruguayan musician and producer who was a member of the Chilean group Los Jaivas and has been based in Paris since the late 1970s) to make a record in Paris, and that she wanted to record with African artists.

Canzani put together a “dream team”, calling several friends to start the session the next day. The line-up included French keyboardist of African descent, Patrick Etonde Bebey (son of Francis), the Argentines Minino Garay (percussion) and Daniel Díaz (double bass), French bassist Junior Gonnand, Norwegian bandoneónist Per Arne Glorvingen and Moisés Alquinta (son of the legendary Gato Alquinta, founder of Los Jaivas) on vocals and programming, as well as ‘Bocha’ Rivero, the guitarist who had arrived with Lágrima on tour. Canzani himself played guitar and other instruments. “The album was recorded in a couple of days,” Canzani recalls, “but for various reasons, the master recording remained lost on a broken computer, which I was able to recover only recently.”

En El Sena (On the Seine) lets us appreciate a wonderful performance from Lágrima Ríos, who was approaching her 80th birthday, in a cosmopolitan musical setting. ‘Bonjour Mama’, the album opener, is a composition by Alberto Mastra, which the singer had already performed in the 1950s. ‘Sanza Caliente’ is an up-tempo, Afro-inspired piece composed by Bebey with a nod to the South African township of Soweto; it’s an explosion of unusual energy. Some pieces by Canzani, such as ‘Charrua’ and ‘De Igual a Igual’, carry a rock influence. Lágrima revisits ‘Duerme Negrito’, a lullaby of Caribbean origins with a strong social impact that was popularised by the legendary Argentine folklorist Atahualpa Yupanqui – Lágrima’s powerful version includes a children’s choir and a rap cameo. There’s also ‘Sur’, a classic tango from the late 1940s, that is here mixed with the sound of candombe drums, and ‘Vereda Tropical’, a classic bolero dating back to the 1930s that Lágrima recorded for the first time at this historical Parisian session; it’s a faithful recreation of golden age bolero, with an extra dose of melancholy courtesy of the bandoneón.

As told by Humphrey Inzillo