Lila Downs

Singer/songwriter Lila Downs will perform at the Grove of Anaheim on Wednesday, August 26. Downs grew up living between two very different cultures in Minnesota and the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Mexico. She draws on her roots by tapping deeply into native Mesoamerican music and sings in the Indian languages of Mexico such as the Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya and Nahuatl.

Lila Downs started singing mariachi songs when she was eight and when she turned 14 she began taking voice lessons. She returned to Minnesota for college where she studied voice and anthropology at the University of Minnesota with the intent on becoming an opera singer until she became disenchanted with the music department. After a few years Lila began singing in the club scenes of Oaxaca and Philadelphia along with Paul Cohen, an expatriate saxophonist who had also been a clown and juggler in the circus. They began collaborating together on songs that would slowly mature into their most recent recordings. - www.grove-of-anaheim.com