Pretty and tough, singer Sacha Nairobi is up for any gig

by Jordan Levin

McClatchy Newspapers

7 December 2006

MIAMI - Slim and girlishly pretty, the beloved baby sister of five older brothers, Sacha Nairobi doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would wallow in dirt. And she admits that she flinched when, on the video shoot for her song “Princesa” at a Homestead, Fla., ranch, director Veronica “Milcho” Milchorena asked her to get down in a mucky pen and roll around with a piglet.

`I was like, `Ooh, ay, OK, really?’” the Venezuelan singer-songwriter said, lips and fingers curling at the memory. But there she is on screen, rolling in the mud and rubbing it on her throat like it was luxurious skin cream, hugging the wriggling pig like a beloved child.

She had to be hosed down afterwards, which is why she also appears naked, a towel around her head, in a bathtub with horses nosing around her. That “Princesa” is about a spoiled girl who opts for happiness with a poor guy only adds to the irony. “It was madness,” Nairobi smiles, eyes rolling.

The daughter of a well-known Venezuelan composer and poet, Sacha Nairobi is tougher - and more unexpected - than she looks. Her instrument is the cuatro, the toy-sized folk guitar of Venezuela, and when she started writing her own songs and working on her album, a lot of people told her she should go for an electric guitar: bigger, more modern, more hip.

But “that would take the lead role away from me,” Nairobi says, strumming her cuatro in the studio in her apartment just west of downtown Miami. “I like that it’s smaller - you see more of me. I think it has a special sound. It defines me as a person. When you play it softly, it’s very emotional, melancholy. If you play it harder, more rhythmically, it’s really happy. Those two feelings come from my roots. For me the cuatro is magic.”

Nairobi’s video-ready (with or without mud) looks, her gift for writing engaging tropical pop songs with a witty femme-feminist attitude, her bouncy confidence on stage, and a contract with Universal Music Publishing would seem to leave her poised for entry into the Latin pop sweepstakes. But so far she’s still working the independent route.

Her debut CD was released by Fabrika Music, a local label, and boyfriend and producer German Ortiz’s company, DonNadie Music, and she has a track on “Radio Latina,” a compilation on Putumayo World Music.

In January she’ll play several dates in Miami. But she recently opened a restaurant, Stone Beach, at the Albion Hotel in South Beach with her brother Jesus Hidalgo, one of three brothers who used to make up the musical trio Los Hidalgo, and two other partners.

“It’s really hard to survive as an artist in Miami - how can they make any money?” says Ortiz (that’s him carrying Nairobi into the bushes on the “Princesa” video). “That’s why she had to open a restaurant.”

Still, not much seems to faze Nairobi (her middle name).

In Maracaibo, called the Little Venice of Venezuela for its many canals, everybody expected the children of Enrique Hidalgo, author of hits like Oscar D’Leon’s “La Carta,” to be musicians.

“It was kind of torture at first,” Nairobi says. “If we arrived at someone’s house without a guitar or a cuatro, it was like an insult. And people expect that you’re going to sing like Celine Dion.”

In part to escape the pressure, she went into acting and almost immediately garnered a role as a Yanomani Indian girl in the film “Aire Libre” - for which she had to chop off her hair and go naked. “I was very shy, I’d never had a boyfriend,” she said. “But I took it like, this is me, and I have to respect my body and how I am.”

But when the family moved to Miami in 1999, the 23-year old Nairobi found herself isolated in the suburbs, watching ducks on a golf course. So she started writing songs. “I couldn’t have written songs before because I’d had no experience,” she says. “When I got to Miami a lot of things happened to me emotionally. And here I was with no money, I didn’t know how to drive, to speak English well - I still don’t - I didn’t have any friends. I just had my cuatro and my family. And I said, “My God, if I don’t do something I’m going to die"."

It was her brother Jesus ("He’s the engine in our family,” Nairobi says) who got her the contract with Universal, although so far it hasn’t led to a commercial breakthrough.

But she’s still writing and dreaming. “The melody and the lyrics come to me at the same time - it’s like the music comes with words,” she says. “The song has a poetic rhythm, and that already has music.”

And she’s still optimistic. “Yes, like all artists, I’ve got commercial ambitions - and social ones,” she says. “I’d like my music to reach more people, make them laugh and think.

“But I’m happy like this. I don’t have any financial or moral or musical obligations.” Only to herself and her family. “They call me every day and say, “Have you written anything?”