Yma Sumac

Between Legend and Reality

You might not believe in the signs of destiny, but if your birth certificate reads Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, it's probably hard to end up as a baker. And in the case of this celebrated Queen of Exotica, the line between truth and legend is often deliberately blurred, in an attempt to build a mythology that matches the sheer evocative power of the music — as if to make that grandiose birth name feel even more fitting.

Born in 1922 and raised in Ichocán, a tiny indigenous village of barely two hundred souls in Cayamarca, a region in northern Peru, young Zoila adopted the stage name Yma Sumac, which in the Quechua language means something like "how beautiful." The Peruvian government claimed the singer was a descendant of the royal Inca bloodline — her mother did indeed bear the surname Atahualpa, like the last emperor captured and killed by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533 — but there is no proof of any such relation. According to the far more cynical American press, Yma Sumac was actually Amy Camus, a housewife from Brooklyn.

Even the story of the government delegation sent from Lima to Cayamarca in search of this astonishing local legend appears to have been a publicity stunt, cannily orchestrated at a time when Peru was reassessing its indigenous roots — the "rediscovery" of Machu Picchu by American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911 had made headlines around the world, shrouding the site in mystery and soon turning it into a coveted tourist destination.

But the legend also fed itself; Yma Sumac was a charismatic woman, austere and mysteriously alluring, with raven hair and a pair of piercing green eyes, an elegant bearing and a regal wardrobe. When she opened her mouth, an otherworldly sound came out. No one before her had so effectively embodied, in the eyes of the Western public, the imagery of the ancient Inca civilization — princess or not. The myth of Yma Sumac still survives today, despite speculation of every kind, as one of the most colorful and peculiar musical figures of the twentieth century.

Of course, the true origins were presumably far more mundane. Yma Sumac met Moises Vivanco in Lima while she was studying; a skilled musician and curious explorer of local folklore, Vivanco was immediately struck by the young woman's presence. The two were soon married and set off across the globe in search of fortune, the most bizarre folk duo ever seen. Around the mid-1940s, Yma and Vivanco landed in New York, where they played small gigs in neighborhood bars until they were noticed by the celebrated composer Les Baxter, who signed them to Capitol and helped shape their first recordings.

There was undoubted chemistry between Yma and Baxter, but also friction, since the singer had a stubborn, volatile, fiery temperament. Baxter recalled:

[…] one moment she'd tell you 'I adore you, you're wonderful' and the next 'I'll kill you,' all in the same breath. She really did say 'I'll kill you,' and I thought I was about to die right there. But she was a marvelous talent.

I think she was very angry with me, but I don't know why

If there's a stereotype that paints opera singers as intriguing, demanding and difficult personalities, Yma Sumac is surely one of those responsible for it, second perhaps only to Maria Callas. Eccentricity, moreover, seems to grow in proportion to talent and range in the upper register. And Yma has both in spades.

The voice

The 20th century was hardly short of figures capable of reaching the most notoriously demanding registers: the feather-light coloratura of Erna Sack, known as the Nightingale of Germany; the ringing soprano of Parisian Mado Robin; the timbral purity of Ingeborg Hallstein; and the inimitable dramatic control of the pianissimo of Montserrat Caballé, known as La Superba, all captivated audiences across the West.

But while these ladies remained firmly within the strict boundaries of bel canto, Yma Sumac instinctively adopted a rule-free style, roaming freely across the five Kingdoms of nature – Manuel de Falla advised her to avoid singing lessons so as not to lose the timbral and interpretive quality that made her so unique. Some opera purists would call it frustrating to see all that potential "wasted" on popular songbook material – criticism that would soon also be aimed at the equally uncategorizable voice of Ivan Rebroff – but Yma Sumac's art is devoted not so much to perfection for its own sake as to the pursuit of a pure, uncontaminated human expression.

At the peak of her health, a vocal range of over four octaves imposed no limits on her: staccatos, glissandos and crystalline coloratura mixed theatrically with dizzying dives into the grotesque, the guttural and the onomatopoeic. Yma is capable of cursing like a dockworker and of duetting with a flute like a little bird. Listening to "Chuncho (The Forest Creatures)", taken from her third studio album "Inca Taqui" (1953), is a paranormal experience, as well as a prime example of a vocal avant-garde that would later be drawn upon by Diamanda Galas, Meredith Monk and Annette Peacock.

As a child I used to go alone into the woods and listen to the sounds of nature and the calls of the animals, I wanted to imitate them

Yma represents the full expressive range of the human voice, and her freedom comes before the wishes of whichever composer she's performing, which is why we'll never find her seriously devoted to the study of Opera. After all, performing Mozart's famous "Queen of the Night" aria in the form of a mambo (!) shows just how little she cared about winning over La Scala's finicky audience.

Exotica, romance

Among classical music purists, there's also a rigid hierarchy of values whereby Bach's fugues and Beethoven's symphonies are considered more serious than the waltzes of the Strauss family or Tchaikovsky's ballets. A similar ideological divide can be observed in 20th-century orchestral music: modern composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev take their place in the world's most renowned concert halls, while on the shores of the New World, the aforementioned Les Baxter, along with Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and Juan Garcia Esquivel, are considered at best craftsmen of postcard-pretty soundscapes, good as background music for cocktail parties or film scores. The term lounge is coined retroactively – literally, the "good living room" – as if to mark out its strictly recreational nature. The short, more immediate song form used in lounge already stands in contrast to the complexity of a symphony's movements.

There remains, nonetheless, an undeniable snobbery in this division, as well as a short-sightedness that fails to take into account the sophistication of certain ideas or the cultural background of these composers, who often bypass the European tradition to dig into big-band jazz and the vast Latin tradition. The point is that the exponents of the so-called lounge phenomenon are often curious and love to have fun – just listen to the tricks devised by Esquivel, who, just like Yma Sumac, occasionally amuses himself by reworking famous classical themes into colorful, cartoonish, almost lysergic romps (his shameless version of Mozart's "Turca" is a case in point). In the hands of these characters, in short, the orchestra becomes a living toy to be explored across its entire range: the strings glide by dreamier than ever, the brass gleams, the woodwinds and percussion conjure imaginary rainstorms, and heavy use is made of instruments with distinctive timbres: xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, glockenspiel, and early electric devices like the theremin and the ondes Martenot.

These were also the years of Hollywood's fascination with unexplored lands and exotic cultures: sorcerers, witch doctors, Arabs on camelback, tribes of cannibals gathered around the cooking pot, dangerous apes and blossoming Brazilian beauties fired up the public imagination in a way not seen since the days of Jules Verne's tales. In music, the term exotica was coined to describe the work of all those musicians who explored – however loosely – sounds perceived as mysterious, arcane, ancient or tribal. British musician David Toop describes the genre as:

Prefabricated landscapes in a real world

implying, too, an undeniable aftertaste of kitsch and camp running through the whole operation. The fact remains that exotica was able to captivate an audience often unaware of the true origins of certain material, yet thirsty for new stories.

For a genre born with openly descriptive intentions, Yma Sumac's voice is the ideal instrument to embody its spirit in all its most demanding and elaborate quirks. And it mattered little to Capitol whether the folklore research she carried out with her husband was traditionally sound or not; wrapped in colorful orchestrations, Yma is the Inca Queen who enchants and seduces like a mountain siren – her roles in the films "Secret Of The Incas" (1954) and "Omar Khayyam" (1956) would only cement her image as a stunning yet mysterious sorceress draped in feathers and gold jewelry.

The early '50s were dominated by the presence of Baxter; his "Ritual Of The Savage" is an exquisite collection of lush instrumental themes and blatant exotic suggestions, devised, as the title suggests, to spark the imagination with tales of adventure and lost treasures. His collaboration with Yma Sumac and Vivanco culminated in the wonderfully imaginative "Voice Of The Xtabay", a dreamlike Andean folklore infused with psychedelic orchestral streaks and a highly distinctive vocal exploration that was an instant sensation.

This marks the beginning of a golden decade for the Peruvian singer, whose fame reaches worldwide proportions: she fills venues in Las Vegas and New York alike (rumor has it she was paid more than Frank Sinatra), as well as London's Royal Albert Hall, where she performs before a young Elizabeth II. Her Soviet Union tour, initially scheduled for two weeks, stretches into six months of concerts in front of millions of spectators, and wraps up in Perm with a meeting with Secretary of State Khrushchev.

And now, everybody on the dance floor (if you can manage it)

“Mambo!” is her most accessible and curiously entertaining collection, the one containing some of the songs that have endured longest in the public imagination. Not only that, “Mambo!” is also the record where the artificial scaffolding of exotica is skillfully bolted onto the rhythms of the other great pop-culture phenomenon that conquered postwar America from Cuba and South America: mambo, precisely.

Composed almost entirely as a joint effort between Vivanco and the author and bandleader Billy May, who here conducts his crackling Rico Mambo Orchestra, “Mambo!” is a find more unique than rare: an extravagant, idiosyncratic and over-the-top record that manages to baffle both purists and dancers alike, while still sounding like one of the liveliest examples of mixed-heritage fantasy let loose on a wide-open leash.

Yma is in dazzling form here, stringing together some of her most memorable performances. Particularly striking is the irresistible one-two punch of “Gopher” and “Malambo No. 1”; the first is a continuous leap over the orchestra's momentum, the second plays out as an inimitable call-and-response in which the performer both sings and plays off herself, shifting register after register as if conjuring up a dazed gallery of characters. Feathered paradise bird, concertante voice, actress and narrator of her own universe: Yma's mambo seduces and wins over the listener with a restless, angular charm all her own.

The army of glittering, movie-style horns on the opening “Bo mambo” curiously makes room for one of the record's most dreamlike and reflective moments; here Yma refuses to be distracted, intoning a vaguely dark folk melody that contrasts with the rhythm. By contrast, the impenetrable staccato of “Taki Rari” and “Chicken Talk” gives rise to a couple of thrilling, spine-tingling vocal feats. With “Five Bottles Mambo”, meanwhile, things descend into the grotesque: Yma becomes a comical fairy-tale creature, chanting a nursery rhyme over triangle and percussion. The peculiar “Indian Carnival” uses a double-tracked vocal as coloring, evoking the sound of the panpipes so dear to the Andean tradition, like the pan flute and the siku. Then there's the marvelous fusion of mambo and exotica on “Jungla”, a track of pure scene-painting suggestion: the gorgeous vocal crescendo that culminates in a thunderous percussion break, before dragging everything back down again, shows an attention to loud/soft dynamics borrowed from the classical tradition, but aptly adapted to the scents of South America.

The prompt 1955 reissue adds three indispensable tracks; “Cha cha gitano” builds a disorienting yet wildly imaginative cross-cultural bridge that might leave you baffled, yet it captures the very essence of the exotica idea: over a swaying dance rhythm, Yma unexpectedly deploys her purest lyric register, worthy of a Bizet opera, to embrace the Iberian flamenco tradition and craft the most stately of laments, while the accompaniment adds a touch of acoustic guitar and the urging of a male chorus. Never was a cha-cha-chà more alien and artificial, and yet it remains impossible not to tap your foot along and picture the dancers' oblique shapes on the floor, led like puppets on a string by the voice of a singer who could have been either a “Carmen” or a witch. Vivanco crafts the beautiful “Carnavalito boliviano”, poised between the joy of a street party and the ache of homesickness, family and roots.

The prize for the funniest moment in her entire discography? “Goomba Moomba”: a catchy brass riff paired with a husky, guttural delivery, pure exquisitely camp and joyously ridiculous suggestion, the defining trait of a record – and a performer – that uses talent and imagination to build a world that may be as fake as plasterboard, but one in which we'd all like to live, if only for a little while.

In conclusion

There isn't much more to add, except to urge everyone to explore the art of Yma Sumac. Streaming platforms are thankfully well stocked: besides her entire discography, it's easy to find the key works of Les Baxter and the other members of the lounge & exotica clique.

In 2019, El Records/Cherry Red made available “The Quintessence”, a box set collecting the six albums Yma recorded between 1950 and 1959, offering a complete overview of the golden decade of this extraordinary and idiosyncratic singer. Hers is pure suggestion translated into a universal esperanto: the legend of the Incas, baroque orchestrations, Peruvian folklore, Hollywood fiction, mambo and cha-cha-chà – everything and more in the imaginary journey of the Fire Diva who managed to set Fifties imagination ablaze.

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21/11/2021