Singer/songwriter Nil Lara combines experimental irreverence with a solid understanding of the global language of music. His songs embody both cross-cultural rhythms and popular music styles. The tracks on his self-titled debut album include emotional yet unsentimental expressions of universal themes of love, longing and loss; nostalgia; and biting meditations on this modern world. His rich, melodic vocals slide into rhythmic chants, the ascend into a keening, primal wail that renders the whole notion of crossover simply irrelevant: Lara is among the rare performers whose singing directly penetrates the soul.
Lara was born in Newark, New Jersey to Cuban immigrants but spent most of his childhood in Venezuela, where music lessons exposed him to that country’s folkloric traditions. At age eight, he learned how to play the cuatro and eventually graduated to the guitar. While studying microwave analysis at the University of Miami, Lara spent his spare time fine tuning his songwriting craft.
In its complexity and simplicity, Nil Lara’s music is a portrait of the singer himself. Its rhythms and melodies reflect the array of elements and events that have influenced his life. The music also foreshadows a gradual evolution, a melting pot for a new American sound.
A born musician with a blatant disregard for musical stereotypes, Lara fluently interchanges the Cuban three-toned tres guitar, the cuatro, a Venezuelan four-stringed instrument, the electric guitar and indigenous percussion instruments with an ease that overcomes any self-consciously ethnic sound. The singer, who habitually performs in bare feet, often invites Miami-based Haitian singers or Cuban percussionists to join him and his three piece band onstage. The informal excitement of Lara’s shows are fueled by his absorbing stage presence as well as by his brand of grass-roots eclecticism which he has cultivated for some time in the South Florida area.
“As a child, I used to watch live performances guajiro (Cuban country) artists and noticed a peculiar tonality which was present all the time. I later discovered that sound to be the tres. It wasn’t until I saw it and heard it in person that I fell for it and started enjoying it.”