Ermelinda Cuellar | Under a Lavender Sky Review

by Elberton Cisnero

In Under a Lavender Sky, Texan-Peruvian vocalist and composer Ermelinda Cuellar traces the long, melodic bridge between Lima and Houston. This is an album of songs with a cultural cartography set to rhythm. Each track charts a point along a continuum where Afro-Peruvian rhythms, American jazz harmonies, and bilingual storytelling intermingle with the clave.

Cuellar’s mother’s migration from Peru to Texas serves as the spiritual axis of the record. Out of that narrative emerges an artist deeply aware of how music preserves ancestry. Singing in English and Spanish, Cuellar transforms inherited sound into lived expression, guided by Horace Alexander Young’s lush, panoramic arrangements that make her duodecet sound like an entire hemisphere in conversation.

The album opens with “Poinciana,” its familiar melody reborn as a ritual of Afro-Peruvian rhythms. Cuellar’s engaging singing is melded with an Afro-Cuban rhythmic foundation. Cuellar uses the human voice as an instrument, language as a rhythm. Her mezzo is supple and expressive and always alive to the pulse beneath the harmony.

When she sings in both English and Spanish, she reveals her rhythmic intelligence. When she sings “Agua de Beber / Water to Drink,” the bilingual phrasing becomes symbolic, as two tongues flow in parallel, merging seamlessly into a beautiful sound. In “Morning,” her rhythmic elasticity, learned from years of navigating jazz phrasing and Latin cadences, turns her voice into an instrument of translation during her scatting.

Arranger and saxophonist Horace Alexander Young provides orchestrations that create perfect settings for Cuellar’s singing. They have frameworks that capture the heart of the cultural dialogue. The use of Afro-Peruvian rhythmic cells connecting to the ensemble voicings allows songs like “Morning” to breathe with hybrid grace.

Listen to the arranging of the brass lines in “Midnight Sun,” where muted brass timbres converse with Darrell Lavigne’s piano. Cuellar’s singing flows with the language of jazz extended into the cadences of the Andes. The percussionists Sam Dinkins III and Marlon Simon deepen this dialogue: cajón-like textures, conga pulses, and subtle syncopations blur the border between swing and compás.

Cuellar’s traditional tracks feature her wonderful, authentic singing, with Young’s arranging ear remaining cinematic. The accordion on “Muñeca Rota” (played by Deborah Ungar) evokes both Andean street processions and Parisian cafés.

Every song here bears historical resonance. “Maria Lando,” written by Chabuca Granda and César Clavo, stands as a cornerstone of Afro-Peruvian resistance music. Cuellar’s rendition honours that lineage: she doesn’t stylize grief but embodies it, her phrasing opening like a prayer against the cello’s elegiac line by Steven Barrett Sills.

In “Tu, Mi Delirio,” she steps into the romantic idiom of Cuban bolero, and the performance glows with the poise of an artist who has internalized the idioms she inhabits. “Song for My Father” is brought to life by the singing of Horace Silver’s composition. The Afro-Latin foundation serves as a metaphorical mirror for Cuellar’s elegant singing.

Recorded at Houston’s Wire Road Studio (January 2024) with Andy Bradley engineering and Jerry Tubb mastering, the sound is crystalline and warm. Cuellar co-produces alongside Young, and her presence as designer and conceptual lead shows: even the cover art, tinged with lavender hues, mirrors the liminal spaces her music inhabits, dusk between day and night, border between languages.

In world music where genres blur and migration defines the modern story, Under a Lavender Sky stands as Cuellar creating a set of songs that show us that world music is not a category but a condition, the state of being between worlds, singing from one into another.

 

Artist: Ermelinda Cuellar
Album: Under a Lavender Sky
Label: Self-Released

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Release Date: March 21, 2025