Claudia Acuña Sings a Spellbinding, Spiritual Set at Lincoln Center

Chilean-born singer Claudia Acuña‘s distinctive sound spans the world of nueva cancion, American and latin jazz. Much as she’s known for the disarming clarity of her vocals – even non Spanish speakers find her easy to understand – she’s also a first-class songwriter. Last night at Lincoln Center, she led her quartet through a frequently gorgeous set that underscored their mutual strengths.

She opened the show solo on a standup drum with a brief, mystical under-the-moonlight tableau, singing in English and Spanish. Then the rest of the band – pianist Pablo Vergara, bassist Carlos Henderson and drummer Yayo Serka – joined her for a slow, achingly spiritual ballad: the impulse to hope for a messiah may be universal these days, but this one’s on us. Vergara’s long, pouncing solo set the stage for an optimism that would prevade the rest of the show despite an undercurrent of disquiet.

The future was a recurrent theme. As Acuña, explained, the night’s second song, Historia, was a shout-out to a yet-unborn godson, an undulating triplet groove beneath her picturesque, naturalistic lyric. The high point of the evening was a haunting take of the anthem Aguita de Corazon. which she dedicated to the people of the south of Chile. After a chillingly starry, modal piano solo, Acuña reached for the stratosphere with her vocalese. It was a vivid salute to a population under fire.

Then she took her time with a requiem for Chick Corea, singing in English at the bottom of her formidable range: “I let him slip away from the game he might have played.” Make of that what you will: Vergara’s piano rose emphatically but spaciously over a syncopated, chugging bassline, to an outro where he flicked chords off the inside of the piano like an autoharp

Acuña and the band did Victor Jara’s El Cigarrito as a brisk clave tune, with a crystalline, articulate cascading piano solo over Henderson’s elastic pulse. They took it out with a wry conversation between bass and vocalese, shamanic polyrhythms from the drums and then a goofy pop song quote appropriate for a thinly disguised ode about smoking a blunt.

Acuña explained that she’d written Futuro when she was pregnant, imagining a toddler amid the pleasing scents of onion, garlic and ocean air. This was definitely a theme for a healthy kid, in fact a heroic one, bouncing along on a tricky, shapeshifting beat, rising to a darkly triumphant chorus, a fanged neoromantic piano solo and finally another spine-tingling wordless vocal coda.

Serka kicked off the Grady Tate tune Sack Full of Dreams with a woody, jungly cajon solo, then the quartet worked a slinky, vampy nocturnal groove that they very subtly took doublespeed after a cheery bit of salsa. Acuña delivered it with the utmost seriousness, an apt echo of the song’s Vietnam War-era hope in the midst of trouble and turmoil.

She closed the show with Hey, her brisk clave-fueled anthem for female empowerment, a no-nonsense entreaty to reconnect with the earth below and the moon above. A gospel-infused interlude was an unexpected treat, followed by a bit of You Are My Sunshine and an unexpectedly successful, tongue-in-cheek dive into audience participation.

The next free concert at the Lincoln Center Atrium is Feb 17 at 7:30 PM with all-purpose Dominican dance band Afro Dominicano. You might want to get there by 7 because the space sells out fast, especially for the dance parties here.