In any tongue, sad songs make Lila Downs happy

WHEN Lila Downs joins the polyglot Tucson rock band Calexico in a Christmas concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall tonight, the border-busting Mexican singer will add to a list of notable Los Angeles area performances, including appearances at the World Festival of Sacred Music, the Getty Center, an Orange County Performing Arts Center world music showcase and a bill of “Latin Divas” at the Greek Theatre.

A classy resume, but come 2006, Downs is thinking about trying something a little earthier.

“We’re planning to do a kind of a tent show -- the notion of the cantina, and maybe actually be able to sell some tequila at the tent, and have maybe not like a circus, but maybe have some visual artists,” Downs says.

“I’m kind of a melancholic person, I think. I love to do the songs that have a lot to do with sadness and dying and crying and the revival of life.... And my husband, my [musical] partner Paul [Cohen], he used to be a circus clown and he was really into the street performing scene, and his approach was, ‘Let’s make it fun.’ ”

Melancholy versus merriment is just one of many dichotomies that drives Downs, 38, the Oaxaca-born daughter of a Mixtec Indian mother and an American father.

Reverence for tradition and a taste for experimentation have animated a body of work that’s established her as a rising force with Latin American audiences, and in the U.S. with Latinos as well as world music fans.

Her latest album, “One Blood/Una Sangre,” won a Latin Grammy last month for best alternative album, and she contributed a song to the new Tommy Lee Jones movie “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”

She figures to expand her reach considerably when she records her first English-language album, but that will come after the just-completed “La Cantina (Entre Copa y Copa),” which will be released March 7 by Narada Records. Made up mainly of rancheras, the album will focus on the songs of the revered Mexican composer Jose Alfredo Jimenez -- which will receive the distinctive Downs treatment.

“It’s a challenge to try to do something new with these forms,” she says. “So we did some of the songs with a very low groove and a beat, and one of them’s like a hip-hop piece. I love to use contemporary instruments and forms of music.... Then on the other hand I love to hear the acoustic sound of the traditional instruments.”

But for Downs, who grew up mainly in Oaxaca and Minnesota (with a year-plus in the Los Angeles area during her high school years), it’s the cultural divide that’s had the most influence on her.

“As an individual growing up in a mixed background, my Indian root was always denied to me, in Oaxaca and also the national culture in Mexico,” says Downs, who now lives primarily in New York City and spends part of the year in Mexico City.

“And then on the other hand in the U.S. culture, my Mexican ancestry was nonexistent where I grew up in Minnesota. I didn’t grow up in a Latino community.”

That sense of displacement has motivated the singer to champion the often-overlooked music of Mexico’s indigenous people, singing in the languages of the Mixtec, Nahuatl and Zapotec.

“That’s very important to me. To show that it’s alive I guess is more important than to say, ‘Oh, here is this language and it’s ancient and look at how amazing it is.’ I love to say, ‘Look at how fun it is and look at how the things that they’re saying in the songs are pertinent to our times and they are very contemporary and they are really cool.’ And that’s more my concern than to keep it in a pure form. It’s really fun to show that.”

Her heritage has even led her to the U.S.’ great poet of the dispossessed, Woody Guthrie, whose “This Land Is Your Land” and “Pastures of Plenty” are sometimes part of her repertoire.

“As I was living in Mexico and I came across many paisanos, migrant workers, who come from my same ethnic group, the Mixtec people, who would go to the U.S. and have stories about working over there,” she says. “Sometimes they would have amazing stories where they would get brought back on a plane and it would be fun for them, and then there were some very tragic stories about people dying in their intent to cross.

“So that was a very important story for me to tell, from this other kind of view, not so much from the national Mexican view but the Indian view, crossing over these different cultural boundaries.

“That’s why Woody Guthrie is so important, because I feel that somehow North Americans can relate. I learned ‘This Land Is Your Land’ when I was in kindergarten and I think probably everyone else has, and the meaning of the song I think is very pertinent to Latino and other migrant communities of these times.”

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Lila Downs

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: $22-$67

Info: (323) 850-2000