Spain’s Concha Buika uses music to focus her capricious mind

Concha Buika used to make things up all the time. She didn’t think of it as lying so much as, well, creating a more interesting reality.

Of course her life didn’t really need to be more interesting.

She grew up as one of six children in the only black family on the Spanish island of Mallorca, worked in Las Vegas as a Tina Turner impersonator and has been married simultaneously to a man and a woman (Buika’s idea).

“The mind is very capricious,” Buika says by phone from the office of her record company in Madrid, her voice and frequent laugh as deep and rich as her smoky, chocolate singing.

“Sometimes we want to remember things that in reality we don’t remember, but they become part of our life and we believe in them. We can get confused.”

When she started singing, she found the line between reality and fantasy became much clearer. “When I really got into music was when I discovered that music made me a better person. It helped me not to lie. I always fantasized a lot, made up a lot of stories. So turning them into songs made me much more sincere myself.

“I got used to singing the truth. There are a lot of artists who put in their songs or sing what they’d like to happen. But I sing what has really happened to me, however horrible or embarrassing it is. I’m not ashamed to be a person, I don’t go looking for virtues or defects or where paradise is, and I don’t want to look for it. I think paradise is all around us. So I compose and sing sincerely to get the things I have inside me out, so they don’t hurt me.”

The things that come out of Concha Buika’s music have made her a star in Spain, where her second album, “Mi Nina Lola,” has been a hit. She is rapidly becoming a world music sensation. She makes her U.S. concert debut Wednesday at Miami’s Manuel Artime Theater before going on to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

Buika’s music is a blend of flamenco, jazz, blues, copla - an old-fashioned romantic Spanish song form - and more, which Buika sings with a combination of jazz cool and flamenco’s ripped-from-the-gut intensity. Her music and her lyrics are as individual as she is. “I believe in myself, and in my way of saying things,” she sings in “A Mi Manera (My Way).”

“I don’t know what is flamenco or what is blues or jazz or rock. I only know what is singing and playing,” says the 35-year-old-singer. “For me the flamenco of (Mexican singer) Chavela Vargas is the same as Dinah Washington. It’s music that comes from the depths, from the place where everything pure comes from. For me (musical) styles seem like little dictators.”

Buika grew up on the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, where the only other black person besides her family was a man hired to stand outside a store as a novelty to attract customers. Her parents were political exiles from Equatorial Guinea, and her father walked out on the family when she was 9. She has happy memories of growing up in a poor neighborhood full of gypsies, playing in the street in her underwear.

“The neighborhood was really fun and really strange,” Buika remembers. “Because it was a neighborhood where there were no rules, and children don’t like rules.”

But she was also an outsider. Women used to touch her kinky hair for luck, and some children were not allowed to play with her.

“I always felt very strange, but it didn’t affect me, because I didn’t know anything else,” Buika says. “For me it was normal to be the only black girl in the neighborhood, in the school, in the disco.”

Although she was surrounded by music, at home, where her mother played American and Latin pop music, flamenco at the homes of gypsy friends, she never studied formally. She got her first job singing, with an R&B band, at 17.

`My aunt called my mother, and said, `Don’t you have a daughter who can sing?’ And my mother said `My daughter Concha sings really well’ because she’d listen to me around the house. I said `Mama, I can’t sing.’ But the salary was 10,000 pesetas, which was a lot of money then, and so I said for 10,000 pesetas I’ll sing, dance and do tricks like a circus monkey.”

She was afraid of performing, but she turned out to be a natural. “The truth is I’m a person who confronts my fears. I got up onstage terrified, but driven to keep going. And from the day I got up onstage they kept offering me work.”

One job was in Las Vegas, where Buika worked in 2001 as a Tina Turner impersonator. “I had some friends from work who’d been there, and so I thought I could just go there, too. I always go around in a very savage, innocent way, because I’m from a small town.”

Her attitude about life is willfully innocent, as well. While she was married to the father of her 8-year-old son, Buika fell in love with a woman and arranged for the three of them to marry. She shrugs off the idea that there is anything strange in this, or in talking about it openly.

“I do what I do, and I’m not doing anything that other human beings haven’t done. All human beings are more or less the same. A lot of people don’t dare do things, but they think about them. People hide something bad. I haven’t done anything bad, so I don’t have any reason to hide it. What rule is there that two people can’t love a third person?”

Splitting from her two partners inspired one of the most powerful songs on her album, “Jodida pero contenta” (Screwed but happy). “I was singing a reality that was exactly what I felt in that moment. Because from that moment on my world was mine. For the first time since I was 17 I felt like I was really in charge of my own life.”

Her music just comes to her when she composes and when she performs, from however she’s feeling and from something else she can’t identify.

“It’s like something comes from very far away and journeys for many years and puts itself in my ear and tells me things,” Buika says. “The same thing happens when I’m onstage. I don’t know where they come from. All of a sudden they’re in my head and I get them out.”

And she makes sure to keep herself open. She never watches herself on TV or reads articles about herself, for fear she’ll become self-critical.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Buika says, laughing. “It scares me a lot. I think that if I see myself I’ll see defects and want to change things. I know how I am. And I don’t want to change anything.”