Magos Herrera - Dreamers (2018)

These days, when even the term “dreamers” is disputed territory, celebrating beauty is a political act. That is the beating heart of Dreamers, the collaboration between Magos Herrera and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. The recording, includes gems of the Ibero-American songbook as well as pieces written to texts by Octavio Paz, Rubén Darío, and Federico García Lorca — all reimagined by a superb group of arrangers including Jaques Morelenbaum, Gonzalo Grau, Diego Schissi, Guillermo Klein and Brooklyn Rider’s own Colin Jacobsen.

The connecting thread is that the poets and songwriters featured on Dreamers came from places that have endured brutal state violence. Consider Violeta Parra, from Chile; Joao Gilberto, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, from Brazil; Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón, from Argentina , García Lorca, Spain and poet, essayist and Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz.

Dreamers is a reminder that “beauty can come out of terrible situations. As Leonard Bernstein said, ’This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before’."