Tish Hinojosa: There’s No Secret to Her Artistic Success

Mystery matters to Tish Hinojosa. Her new album, “Dreaming From the Labyrinth,” reaches toward it, seeking to touch its ungraspable essence by using sheer melodic beauty as a medium.

Mystique--which has to do with image, not essence--is something Hinojosa lacks utterly, which is why it’s no mystery that this tremendously gifted and uncommonly diverse singer-songwriter from Texas has remained a cult item since her national debut in 1989.

Hinojosa’s lack of mystique has nothing to do with blandness. It has to do with a complete rejection of overt artifice, pretense and inflated gesture.

Singing Tuesday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, Hinojosa, lovely in long tresses and a plain, dark dress, did not use songs as vehicles to advance an image, an ego, a persona, a career. She subsumed herself in the thematic substance and graceful flow of her music--an act of great purity made possible by her rare purity of voice.

Here was an artist--singing in English and Spanish and backed by a guitarist and a keyboards-accordion player--who trusted that her songs were meaningful and graceful, that her voice was lovely and that nothing more would be needed to reach her audience. She was right. The gathering of 150 or so fans was enthralled, both by the eight-song sequence of “Labyrinth”-ine mysteries and by the earthy folk-rock, country and Tex-Mex music that followed.

It’s worth paying close attention to the artistic choices of a singer this serious. After slipping with her 1994 release, “Destiny’s Gate,” which suffered from glossy production that seemed to be an overt bid for the Mary Chapin Carpenter folk-pop-country crowd, Hinojosa has come back with “Labyrinth,” an album with no obvious target market but a great deal of purpose.

Having established herself with down-to-earth songs about her upbringing in San Antonio, about cowboys and migrant workers and her Mexican musical and cultural heritage, she has leaped into a world of symbols and dreams and mysterious currents. An almost-complete, nearly sequential rendition of the 10-song album captured its reverent cast.

Moody or achingly lovely hues were broken only by the energetic salsa rhythms of “Laughing River Running” and the chiming folk rock of “God’s Own Open Road.” Hinojosa sang about the eternal currents of life, the inevitability of loss and the possibility of redeeming loss through love.

All but one of her new songs was built around a single set of lyrics repeated bilingually. It’s a choice that might smack of strained political correctness, coming from this proponent of bilingual education, if it were not so artistically appropriate to the purpose at hand.

Bilingual repetition would be disastrous for complex, narrative songs requiring character development and accretion of detail--the writer would be wasting on translation half the precious time needed to flesh out plot and theme. Hinojosa’s new songs are not narratives, however, but fragments and impressions, fleeting traces from the world of dreams and mysteries. Bilingual delivery allows her to give her songs a crosscurrent of shifting accents and textures well suited to a dreamscape.

Helping her weave the moods were her longtime accompanist, Marvin Dykhuis, using a nylon string guitar for those humid, dark touches, and Chip Dolan, whose synthesizer and piano lent somber textures without sounding blatantly portentous, which is a real risk with music that has a mystical bent. A rhythm section would have been helpful on the salsa tune, but the trio otherwise sounded full enough.

The second half of this long, enchanting evening displayed Hinojosa’s talents as a country singer worth mentioning alongside Emmylou Harris, as a writer of folk-county-rock anthems worthy of Nanci Griffit, and as an interpreter of Mexican styles ranging from zestful polkas to sentimental pop ballads.

“Bandera del Sol/Flag of the Sun” sounded like the kind of substantive, dignified anthem of unity-amid-diversity that the Olympics ought to have, when instead the games likely will be represented by some sort of shmaltzy bombast. “Amanecer” sounded as if it belonged in a Disney musical cartoon feature--assuming Disney would be willing to trade Celine Dion-brand syrup and show for Hinojosa’s unadorned loveliness and simplicity.

No, the woman has no mystique. She only has everything that matters.

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Bill Miller was a fitting opener for Hinojosa. The Native American singer-songwriter seeks to bring the struggles and traditions of his people to life in music, while at the same time refusing to be bound by a strictly traditional style.

Miller and his backing duo of percussion and electric bass touched repeatedly on native rhythms but added their own variations and colors, often by hammering hard as they strummed, or tapping out firm rhythms and glancing harmonics on their guitar necks. Miller’s swirling blasts on traditional flute sounded a keynote at the start, and his high, prayerful keening on “Praises” lifted the show to an intense peak at mid-set.

But the Nashville-based Miller also tapped into heartland rock anthems with memorable choruses--sometimes hitting the sweet, fervent note of a Bono Hewson. He also used a well-wrought acoustic blues boogie to carry his determined message of overcoming and renewal. While most of his music hit with a high-stakes urgency, Miller was a relaxed and humorous host between songs, able to jokingly counter some of the stereotypes that beset Native Americans and their music.

The reservation-raised, Mohican-German performer demonstrated how the true, fundamental Indian rhythm “is the beat of a heartbeat.” Then he mimicked the ersatz drums- along- the- warpath Hollywood version-- BOOM- boom- boom- boom- BOOM- boom- boom- boom. “If your heart beats like that,” he said, “you’re having a heart attack.”

In a 50-minute concert of building intensities, surprising rhythmic and dynamic shifts and strong tunes in a wide range of styles, Miller had no trouble establishing himself as a skilled, passionate and distinctive performer.