October 18, 2004

To discover the prodigious talent of Eva Ayllón at this late date is like suddenly noticing Niagara Falls: She's been generating electricity all along, even if not everyone was paying attention. Ayllón, the matriarch of Afro-Peruvian music, began her singing career at 14; 34 years and more than 20 albums later, she's still strutting the stage in spindle heels, threading her ductile voice through a dense mesh of percussion.

At Town Hall on Friday night, she romanced an audience considerably smaller than the arenas-full she commands in Peru, yet the creaky old place shuddered with raucous pleasure even before she sashayed onstage. Two and a half hours later, I understood.

Ayllón's natural public here is one of immigrant adorers, but she came with a gospel to spread: Peru is more than Machu Picchu, woolen hats and Andean pipes. Following in the path of Susana Baca, Ayllón has just released her first CD in the United States, singing the black roots music of Peru's coastal lowlands.

She and Baca share a library of genres and tunes: "Cardo o Ceniza," ("Thistle or Ash") a fiercely erotic love song by Chabuca Granda in the form of a sultry dance called the landó; the canonic "Toro Mata" ("The Bull Kills"), without which no Afro-Peruvian performance is complete; the carnal creole waltz; the refined frenzy of the festejo.

Each of these dances has its own moves, pulse and conventions, but taken together, Ayllón's repertoire is a festive, frankly sexual kind of blues, in which the voice scuds and skips across a rhythmic surf. The anchor is the cajón, an instrument derived from packing crates that slaves adapted when their Spanish masters banned drums as dark and satanic. The piano, electric bass and amplified guitar are appropriations from abroad, and a reminder that purism makes no sense in such a gloriously hybrid tradition.

Ayllón is older and fuller of figure than is permitted of her norteamericana pop- star counterparts, who aspire to remain eternally 16, and her subject matter and sophistication are adult, too. Her voice slips between a breathy purr and a brassy bellow, with many shades of in-between. She slips into the beat just an instant behind the drums, laying a warm, pliant sound against the percussion's lockstep knock and clang. She warned children to avert their ears from one particularly carnal number, but most of this music has a luscious earthiness, even when its topic is a people's epic pain.

Though Ayllón exuded emotive freedom, hers was the spontaneity of the consummate professional, supported by the intricate precision of her band. Among the members of her nonet, the protean percussionist Rony Campos, the cajón player Gigio Parodi, the guitarist Tito Manrique and the bassist Felipe Pumarada are each high-order virtuosos, but it was the welded bond of their ensemble that kept the motor at a joyous thrum.