You’ve seen them everywhere from the moment you entered the culture of Southern California — calaveras, those happy skulls that unite the folks on the patio with the punks in the street. A central signifier of the international holiday Día de los Muertos, calaveras provide the point of departure for the Santa Barbara Bowl’s October 26 concert event featuring Lila Downs.
A continuation of the Bowl’s annual tradition of supporting Día de los Muertos, the show, which takes place on what is sure to be a festive Saturday night, will feature not only a complete concert by Downs, one of the most popular singers in Mexican history, but also the Grandeza Mexicana Folk Ballet Company and the Mariachi Femenil Flores Mexicanas. Billed as a “celebration of music, dance, and ritual,” the event will fill the Bowl with ofrendas where people may place calaveras as offerings. People are encouraged to wear spectacular costumes and be made up to look like stylized skeletons.
For Downs, this rich tapestry of music and ritual combines two key aspects of her career and her personality, as she is at once a great artist and an anthropological activist, someone who engages her audiences on multiple levels and whose artistic aim is to induce pleasures that are rooted in cultural solidarity. It’s why her songs focus on food so frequently, as on her most recent release, 2019’s Al Chile. The album, which was produced by Camilo Lara, stretches to encompass the whole range of contemporary music, from cumbias and rancheras to jazz, folk, and even hip-hop. On it, Downs duets with Norah Jones for the Gillian Welch/David Rawlings ballad “Dear Someone” and with Chilean singer Gepe on “Sé Feliz.” There’s also a funky cover of Manu Chao’s “Clandestino” and plenty of other spicy hotness to add flavor to the heavenly core of Downs’s unforgettable voice.