Twice during our 22-minute Zoom, Aida Cuevas marks her professional career age: one year shy of a golden anniversary. Beaming in from Mexico City – where her father’s family from Michoacán and her mother’s clan out of Veracruz fated her future parents meeting cute there in a theatre class – she pauses dramatically both times. Cuevas mulls over the number both with fierce pride and genuine wonder.
“My father loved opera, so they named me Aida,” she begins in gorgeous, old-world Spanish. “He wanted me to sing opera, so I started vocalizing bel canto [18th century Italian singing] at 11. But I didn’t want to sing opera.
“I wanted to sing ranchero.”
She did, beginning in the early Seventies and to nearly immediate acclaim in the fifth-most populous market on the planet. 1977 debut Aida Cuevas con el mariachi continental Estrada opens slightly tipsy, hiccuping “La tequilera.” Thickly analog and supple of tongue, the singer sounds audibly ingénue, yet preternaturally wizened. Spry, powerful, nuanced, she’s full of musical melodrama and innate truth-saying.
“Where there’s mariachi, there’s a fiesta,” she laughs. “The music of mariachi gives identity to a whole country: Mexico. Ranchera music I interpret [through it] takes you through many moods.
“When you’re really happy, you play a son. When you’re really sad, you listen to José Alfredo. When you’re melancholy, you listen to Cuco Sánchez or Juan Gabriel.
“It’s a range of colors, mariachi music. And I’m very proud to sing it.”
Opening her rousing two-volume Antología de la Música Ranchera at the start of the pandemic, Michoacán shout-out “Juan Colorado” throws back a double-shot of the singer ultimately poured throughout a three-dozen-deep discography garnering both domestic and Latin Grammys. Last month’s Aida Cuevas Vuelve a Cantar a Juan Gabriel re-creates 1986’s Aida Cuevas Canta a Juan Gabriel song-for-song, celebrating her country’s late Elton John-like icon.
Guitarrón bears down on the original in a hard strum punctuated by brass and flourished by strings. Cuevas acts as dea ex machina, trumpeting soprano blistering the mic. Her vibrant, air-quaking command rings all bells down at the cathedral as she hits notes, octaves, and emotions sure as Evita. Drunk on love and heartbreak, she intones the human heart: big, broken, desperate. Her new reading on that same material manifests a lifetime’s gravitas. Introduced to and prompted to sing for Gabriel at 14 during a workshop, then produced by the flamboyant crooner-composer four years later, she marks 34 years this time – collaboration with her son’s godparent. Last decade’s two installments of Totalmente Juan Gabriel prove lush and sweeping, full of mariachi catcalls and strumming hooks. Her 1993 LP Quizá Mañana shares its lugubrious title cut with Cuevas’ favorite song on her new album.
“’Quizás Mañana’ talks about heartbreak, no?” she explains. “When they betray you, when they play with you and your emotions. I started to sing it …”
She begins singing high and light.
“’Tú me dijiste, que no me ibas … .’
“But I didn’t feel anything, because I sang it like, I don’t know, the national anthem. So [Gabriel] let me sing it, then came out of the producer’s booth to where I stood recording. He put on a big pair of headphones and stood in front of me.
“’I’m going to sing it for you.’
“So from” – she holds up her hands four inches apart – “he started to sing it to me and halfway through the tears appeared.”
She puts a pinky to the corner of each eye and traces down invisible trickles.
“He finished singing – me crying with him – and told me, ‘Record it.’
“One take is all it took.”
Aida Cuevas
Wednesday 9, Dell Hall at the Long Center
This article appears in October 4 • 2024.