4/24/2023 0 Comments Yma sumac wimoweh![]() Her live recordings require nothing less than a reassessment of her stature as a musical artist.īy any standard, Sumac was a superb vocalist, but unlike most pop singers, who must rely upon projection of personality over culture and discipline of vocal means, Sumac wedded a sometimes charming, sometimes seductive and sometimes menacing performing personality to an extraordinarily well developed vocal technique that would be the envy of a great many classical singers. Even her unique vocal endowment was greater than suspected, caught live. What is apparent from her live material is that in person, Sumac was a far more versatile performer than one might suspect from her albums, singing with an unexpected vivaciousness and depth of feeling that add up to a musical artist of much greater range and substance. Rather, the commercial albums are mostly "concept albums," and of all the material heard on them, only a small percentage found its way into her live programs, and then often in quite different presentations, although this small list of songs became staples of her concerts for a number of years. That career included hundreds of live performances all over the globe, in all kinds of venues. Sumac's live recordings make it clear that her commercial recordings, fine as they are, are not representative of her actual performing career. ![]() ![]() She was a vocal wonder but a lot more than that, a wonderful live performer who thrilled audiences in a performing career lasting four decades. It could fairly be said that she singlehandedly started the exotica craze in American pop music that lasted for at least a decade, until rock-and-roll took it over. Her first album, a 10" Capitol LP entitled Voice of the Xtabay, was a must-have for all those who considered themselves hi-fi aficionados, and it has never been out of the catalog since, in one format or another. Her appearance also coincided roughly with the introduction of the long playing record. Sumac burst upon the scene in 1950, just as the public was discovering "high fidelity" equipment that, unlike most of the consumer phonograph equipment of the 1940s, could reproduce a semblance of high frequency response. Now, at last we have the opportunity to assess her unique talents based upon releases of live performances, in which both her superb quality as a vocalist and her genuine artistry as a performer can be more accurately understood and appreciated. (1) There have always been those who refused to believe what they were hearing on those recordings, an incredibly exotic voice seeming to span across more than four octaves. She retired in the early-'60s, but made a comeback in 1987 at New York’s Ballroom.Until recently, with few exceptions all that most Yma Sumac fans could know of her artistry is what could be heard on her handful of commercial record albums. With minimum publicity (at first), the 10-inch album sold half a million copies, and it was followed by an enormously successful concert appearance at the Hollywood Bowl as well as a series of releases for Capitol, all in the same kitsch Latin style. Her first album for Capitol Records, VOICE OF THE XTABAY, with songs by Vivanco and arranged by Hollywood session leader Les Baxter, was released in 1950. After performing with the Compania Peruana de Arte, in her native Peru, Sumac travelled to New York in 1947 with her husband, composer Moises Vivanco. One of the most flamboyant singers of the '50s and an original proponent of exotica, Yma Sumac was the subject of a series of publicity campaigns designed to add to her mystique: was she an Inca princess, or a Brooklyn housewife named Amy Camus (Yma Sumac spelt backwards)? What was undeniably genuine was Sumac’s remarkable four-octave range.
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