Her Concept: Freedom

Albita gave her fans an odd admonition when introducing a complex new song during her powerful concert Sunday at the Mayan Theatre. Don’t read too much into the lyrics, the Cuban diva told her fans. Don’t try to make too much sense of them.

But this song screams out for interpretation. What does she mean by the sardonic title, “Son Sin Concepto”? How could this son (referring to the traditional Afro-Cuban genre) not have a concept? It has more than 60 lines of monologue, a provocative, spoken stream of thought. And it’s addressed directly to the listener (“you”) in such a commanding tone, the singer sounds alternately like a wise observer, a parent, a guru.

She must be trying to tell us something. Just watch how intensely she performed it. The way she stepped to the very edge of the stage, looking over the crowd as if speaking to some invisible figure in the back. The passion in her, face framed by those disheveled curly red locks. The moral conscience in that pointed finger, emphasizing a line like a preacher.

“I want you to be free,” the song says in Spanish. “Free in your heart, free in your soul. Your soul, the only thing absolutely free.”

Albita’s ardent fans were too busy adoring her and dancing to engage in verse analysis. If only they had known the real story behind that song, they might have stopped to study it, despite her warning.

Albita wrote the “no-concept” song about three years ago, at the start of a most trying and painful period in her life. The once-celebrated superstar of Miami’s trendy South Beach has endured the collapse of her recording career, the loss of her only brother to cancer and the death of her grandmother in her native Cuba, which she left more than a decade ago.

“I am barely emerging from a time I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” said Albita, 40, during an interview in Spanish the day before her Mayan show. “Maybe that’s why I got this crazy urge to record my own songs, to rescue so many things. I suddenly felt this anxiety about dying and not leaving enough of my songs recorded.”

In her moving and personal new album, “Hecho a Mano” (Made by Hand), Albita rescued 11 compositions from the stash of 200 unpublished works she has accumulated over the years.

Though they span her adult life from 1984 to 2000, many selections share a certain mournfulness, an emptiness and yearning.

Albita has been composing since she was 7, but she’s not organized about cataloging her work. She keeps some on tape, some on paper, some half written, none clearly labeled.

“Every time I try to look for one, it’s like I’m moving,” she joked after lunch at a noisy Pasadena restaurant.

She started writing “Son Sin Concepto” after a disappointing meeting with executives from Sony, her former record company. She had just finished her previous album, “Son,” which would have been her fourth produced by Emilio Estefan Jr. for Sony’s Epic label.

But Albita said the label refused to release it. Why? Because it didn’t have a concept.

The concept, she tried to explain, is the son, that durable, danceable style that started in rural Cuba at the turn of the century and later gave rise to modern salsa. The label suggested she should do some duets, Albita recalls.

The creative disagreement led to a protracted standoff. Sony wouldn’t put the album out, she said, and wouldn’t let her have it. (Sony representatives could not be reached for comment.)

She calls it cruel treatment, a “violation of human rights.” That’s an ironic charge from a woman who fled communist Cuba, where, she said, the government-controlled record industry wasn’t interested in releasing her music either. Her traditional tastes were considered too old-fashioned at the time.

“I’m used to swimming against the current,” she said. Exasperated with the label, she went straight from the meeting in Miami, where she lives, to a rehearsal with her former band. She told them what had happened and came up with the chorus that would become the catchy kernel of her cathartic tune: “Oye mi son, sin concepto”--hear my son without a concept.

The spoken parts came later, with arresting verses addressed to a youth coming home to a drunk father and exploited mother or to a woman who “must live and die in the kitchen.”

“Tu tienes que parir y maquillarte / Tu tienes que parir y ser decente / Tu tienes que parir y aniquilarte / Tu tienes que parir y ser bien fuerte.” (You must give birth and put on your makeup ... and be decent ... and vanish ... and be very strong.)

By giving orders as if she’s received them, Albita defines the role and rebels against it simultaneously. Her anger is palpable.

Anger at being trapped, constrained by expectations. In some ways, she had also been trapped by the high-gloss glamour of her old image, a stark contrast from her country roots.

It all seems a marketing contrivance now: those androgynous suits and trendy berets, that bright red lipstick masking her large mouth, the short hair coifed like a mannequin’s.

Albita finally won the rights to her disputed album. She took it to Times Square Records, a small specialty label in New York, which released it in 2000.

She then recorded her engrossing new work, an acoustic throwback to her origins in trova, the New Song movement. The cover shows her holding her guitar, her lipstick softer, hair now long, loose and natural.

With a brilliant and jazzy band at the Mayan, she performed four tunes from the new album during her 90-minute set. A salsa sextet hasn’t played with this much swing since Joe Cuba’s seminal group in the ‘60s or Ruben Blades’ in the ‘90s.

Far from heavy, Albita’s show was vibrant, joyful and spontaneous.

Dressed simply in white, she cleansed her spirit onstage with a frenetic rumba, waving a red scarf over her head to expunge her troubles. The Santeria ritual was working: Albita appeared to be having the time of her life.

“I’m in that moment when I must carry on and go forward,” she said during the interview. “There’s one thing that really helps, and that is loving what you do.”