Lila Downs Tickets - Nothing Down About This Music Artist, Though

When this Mixteca Indian from Mexico was born in 1968, no one thought she would be following around the Grateful Dead on tours in a VW bus while making money by selling and making jewelry. For sure, it seemed no one thought she'd be singing at all. Lila Downs surprised everyone. She went ahead and went back to college in Minnesota, obtaining a double degree -- one in anthropology and the other in, yes you guessed it, voice studies -- and then moved to Oaxaca, her mother's hometown in Mexico. It was there that she discovered her love for singing. That love, that passion, became a fruit of prosperity in her life as she released her first work in cassette in 1994.

Lila Downs Tickets - The Music of Downs

The name of that cassette was Ofrenda, and it sparked plenty of interest for a second release called Azulao: En Vivo con Lida Downs in 1996. She earned so much recognition that she won a Best Original Latin Jazz Composition. Work continued as she revolutionized the Spanish music industry with 1997's La Sandunga, earning her a record contract with BMG in the United States in 1999. One of her best tracks on that was the passionate 'La Llorana.' In 2000, Tree of Life was released, an album going back to Downs' roots as a Mixteca Indian.

Lila Downs Tickets - The Sound and Style of Downs

She is by the far the only Spanish music artist to take jazz into the genre and make it mainstream. That's unheard of. With a look like the famous artist Frida Kahlo, she is immortalized.