Buika, La Noche Más Larga, review We've been hearing a lot about singers "making songs their own" of late. It feels as though every time I've turned on the television over the last two months there's been Jessie J of The Voice, telling some young hopeful who's about to launch into a song that they, "really need to own it." Anyone who wonders quite what that means should listen to flamenco superstar Concha Buika. With a husky roar of a voice that envelops the listener like a great blast of muffling Andalusian heat, this is a woman who could make the One Direction songbook sound like a masterpiece of powerhouse, tormented passion. Born in Mallorca of African ancestry (her parents are from the former-Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea), this sometime house diva and Tina Turner impersonator has taken the conservative, insular world of flamenco by storm. And now she's set her sights on the rest of us. On this multi-textured, multi-layed Afro-latin-flamenco-jazz fusion album, recorded in New York, she takes well-loved standards by Jacques Brel and Billie Holliday to places their creators never knew existed. If Buika's previous forays into crossover haven't all been entirely successful - I recall some slightly queasy attempts at R&B - this album is something else altogether. Beginning in a mellow cocktail lounge mood, the music refuses to settle into the anticipated easy listening predictability. Buika's earthy waverings follow their own path; Ivan "Melon" Lewis's sprightly Afro-Cuban piano patterns take an equally individualistic course. Dancing jauntily round Buika's nicotined vocal arabesques one moment, off into his own lyrical reveries the next, he brings to mind a younger, jazzier incarnation of the great Buena Vista maestro Ruben Gonzalez. And if it feels, on initial listening, that things aren't quite hanging together, that's because neither of the principles, percussionist Ramon Porrina, nor the various guest musicians, bother with boring conventions such as who's leading and who's supporting, but feel their way towards each others" musical pulses in an essentially jazz way. Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas is powered by a strident piano figure, while the tender reading of Holliday's Don't Explain is the only overtly flamenco number, with clapping and skittering guitar. But if you're not paying close attention you won't recognise either. The material is turned inside out and reinvented. Buika's singing gets more powerful as the album progresses, achieving a magnificent throaty soulfulness on the title track, while Santa Lucia, a barnstorming tribute to young love, is enhanced by cascading kit-drumming. This is wonderfully subtle artistry, redolent of hotter climes, that reveals more the deeper you go into it. Not the easiest listen you'll have this summer, but definitely one of the most rewarding. Download this: Ne me Quitte pas