Spanish Female Singers 2011

Charming Hostess is a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Our music explores the intersection of text and the sounding body– complex ideas expressed physically, based on voice and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. We live where diasporas collide, incorporating piyyutim and Pygmy counterpoint, doo-wop and niggunim, work songs and Torah chanting. The texts speak of mysticism and sex; angels and demons; and the trials and joys of love and sex…

Carl Heinrich Graun (1703/4–59) was one of the two most famous composers of Italian opera in 18th-century Germany, his only serious rival being Johann Adolf Hasse at the court in Dresden. He was the court composer of Prussian King Frederick the Great. He wrote at least 26 highly acclaimed operas for the Berlin Unter den Linden opera house that Frederick built for that purpose, in addition to the six he had written for an earlier patron.

Playing hand percussion and drum kit with a variety of different stars and lesser knowns, Acuna spans the breadth and depth of Latin-based rhythms from his native Peru through Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and other South American locales. Notables Giovanni Hidalgo, Luis Conte, Anthony Carrillo, and Paoli Mejias join a varying sized cadre of singers and fellow percussion helpmates to stroll through this multi-cultural mosaic of percussive splendor. Of the smaller ensemble tracks, "Bemlerias" is a 6/8 song with electric bass and keyboards on the more contemporary side, while "L.A. Rap" sports Spanish trash talk, and the ten-minute "Descarga at Dawn" is the ultimate cha based workout for quintet with Acuna on the kit.

Olivia Ruiz rose to fame in 2001 as a contestant on the first edition of the TV reality show Star Academy, the French equivalent of American Idol. Subsequently, Ruiz exploited her popularity to secure a record deal and pursue a solo career. Certainly, her Star Academy background has been both a curse and a blessing for Ruiz. On the one hand it allowed her to become a recording artist; on the other it made her immediately suspicious to critics and music lovers, because of the dubious musical merits of such shows. It is thus an unexpected and pleasant surprise to realize than in her solo albums Ruiz is firmly bent in disowning the Star Academy stigma, enthusiastically embracing instead the French chanson genre. More surprising still is the fact that she actually fully succeeded in her goals with the release of her second album, La Femme Chocolat. A marked improvement, both artistically and commercially, over her 2003 debut, J'aime Pas l'Amour, La Femme Chocolat sold over a million copies and turned Ruiz into one of the best-paid French female singers of her generation.

It is easier to define Dionne Warwick by what she isn't rather than what she is. Although she grew up singing in church, she is not a gospel singer. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are clear influences, but she is not a jazz singer. R&B is also part of her background, but she is not really a soul singer, either, at least not in the sense that Aretha Franklin is…

Viktor Lazlo is the self-titled second studio album by French-Belgian singer Viktor Lazlo. Belgium was responsible to host the Eurovision Song Contest after Sandra Kim had won in 1986 with her song J'aime la vie. Lazlo was asked to host the event as she is fluent in several languages and thus her self-titled album became very successful all over Europe, entering the Top 20 album charts in Holland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It spent 19 weeks on the German album charts. The first single off the album was Breathless, which was co-written by Lazlo herself and features backing vocals by James Ingram and Bunny DeBarge. An official video was shot for the song and she also performed it at the beginning of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1987. The song reached No. 7 on the Belgian single charts. The songs Take Me and You Are My Man were also released as singles.