Downs Captures Some of Mexico’s Many Voices

Mexico has had an amazing capacity to absorb and transform the musical and cultural streams that have poured into it from all directions. But the popularity of those transformations, both inside and outside Mexico, have tended to overshadow the rich, multilayered indigenous musics that exist in every section of the country.

Singer Lila Downs’ show “Spirits of the Cloud People,” at the Williams Auditorium of the Getty Center on Wednesday night, was a a revelatory experience, an opportunity to hear at least some of that music, in this case primarily from the southern state of Oaxaca and the Yucatan state of Quintana Roo.

But Downs’ performance--an entry in the World Festival of Sacred Music--was by no means a dry ethnomusicological treatise. Accompanied by five skilled musicians, playing harp, percussion, guitar, bass and keyboards (with some violin and saxophone doubling), she was captivating in every sense. Blessed with a pliable voice and an exceptional range, she invested her songs with an artful array of sounds and manners. Coy and playful on a song such as “La Iguana,” she was equally at home with the dark, ghostly depths of “La Llorona.”

Downs’ versatility extended to language as well, as she sang in Zapotec, Mayan and Mixtec, the last the language spoken by her mother’s family in Oaxaca. Her rendering of the Zapotec song “Xquenda” was as passionate, as emotionally sophisticated, as anything by Edith Piaf. And, in “Semilla de Piedra,” she combined the languages of her Spanish and Mexican heritage in an original composition metaphorically describing her own roots.

Enthusiastically received by a packed house, Downs’ entertaining illumination of the bounteous diversity of Mexican culture was a performance that deserves a far wider hearing.

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* The World Festival of Sacred Music continues through Sunday. Hotline: (310) 208-2784; https://www.wfsm.org/americas