CANCELLED: Silvana Estrada

Silvana Estrada is the 24-year-old folk singer-songwriter from Veracruz being called the “millennial Chavela Vargas.” She can build her own stringed instruments by hand and has – at least as a kid – but she was also raised by luthiers and surrounded by music, eventually studying jazz at a Mexican conservatory and making a beautiful album with Charlie Hunter. Her debut solo full-length, Marchita, draws from Veracruz’s native style jarocho, a delicate, chiming music largely drawing percussion from the feet of dancers, but this is no dance LP. Marchita also pulls from biting rancheras for an intensely intimate story of post-breakup disillusionment played on a Venezuelan cuatro. Full of melismatic singing, Silvana work is all poignance, vulnerability, and drama, like a late-night fiesta that veers into drunken, tearful karaoke. “This whole thing of singing songs and drinking and crying at some point – even if we are partying, we get to do that and it’s not like a heavy thing to do,” Silvana tells the Chronicle. “I have this deep connection with ‘bad emotions’ and ‘bad feelings,’ and in Mexico, I feel like we have a deep connection with sadness and loss… but then we have this amazing cultural thing of finding beauty in everything … I have a lot of that in what I do. And even Marchita is a celebration of a breakup.” – Christina Garcia