La Negra: The Definitive Collection

With neither ‘Gracias a la Vida’ nor ‘Maria Maria’ on it, this double album is not quite the definitive collection it claims to be, but it's still a superb sampler of the brilliant, varied, inspiring career of the Argentinian singer. The tracks, spanning four decades, feature duets with a stellar cast of artists – including León Gieco, Milton Nascimento, Ariel Ramírez, Antonio Tarrago Ros and Jaime Torres – and songs by master lyricists such as Charly García, Pablo Milanes and Atahualpa Yupanqui. This 40-song compendium is a journey through Sosa's homeland of north-west Argentina, across the pampas to the big city, into exile (she spent 1979-1982 in France and Spain) and back to Buenos Aires, where she lived from 1982 until her death in 2009. She has toured the world, picked up three Grammys and sang on behalf of the poor and the passionate, the dispossessed and the disappeared. Singing ballads, odes, zambas, lullabies, chacareras, tangos and vidalitas, and merging several forms in her own versions of the nueva canción genre, she kept her roots firmly planted in her Andean origins, but married parochial sentiment with a global political message. Her stirring voice holds all this together; it's not just the sheer space and volume of Mercedes Sosa's deep alto, but the faint emotion-bearing tremulousness that lies at that voice's outer edges. I defy anyone not to be moved by ‘Luna Tucumana’, ‘Solo le Pido a Dios’ and ‘Toda Cambia’. If you don't own all these songs already, buy this album.