María Márquez: Tonada

This Venezuelan-born US-based singer has a deep voice in the way that Brazilian women singers — especially — can have deep voices, low without being husky, rich, vibrating slightly to show emotional pain where the lyrics call for it (“Déjame”). The album is low-key and steady, no attention-grabbers, just a multitude of smaller moments embedded in the larger body, a sensational gruntle from a tough little Venezuelan cuatro on “Caramba”; that thing sounds almost human. Hernan Gamboa the cuatro player has his name next to a number of these tracks as a co-arranger. Both he and Márquez keep a current of murmuring Venezuelan folk running through the whole thing, with some sidesteps into a more North American idiom (“Wild Card”, jazz) and one completely Brazilian moment with her version of João Donato’s “Amazonas”. This is the point when I realized how low-key the rest of Tonada was, because the album seemed to open its eyes and develop a more complicated personality when the Brazilian song came in. Just brashness maybe. But it seemed more awake.