In May 2009, shortly after the release of her third album, Lhasa, with the help of the team that helped her create this new collection of fine pearls, gave a few concerts ahead of a tour that was set to take place six months later. Joe Grass on guitars, Sarah Pagé on the harp, Miles Perkin on the double bass and Andrew Barr on drums formed an organic whole with the singer, which held together very well. Naturally, they gave pride of place to the compositions of this recent Lhasa. Nine songs of the fourteen, which sound more or less like studio recordings, with a tendency towards a slowing-down of the tempo, became well-known on 1001 Nights, which reinforced their shadowy aspect. The group had no difficulty at all in appropriating some older themes, taking a jaunty, jazzy rhythm on Con Toda Palabra by The Living Road, transforming De Cara a la Pared, which opened La Llorona, by means of a long abstract intro. They lent an Andean air to Par El Fin Del Mundo, thanks to the foregrounding of a charango and a harp. All this might give a little insight into the plans of the singer who at the time wanted to pay homage to Latino icons Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. A departure from the norm in terms of her back catalogue, a magnificent cover of a Sam Cooke standard A Change Is Gonna Come and the echoes of an unruly intervention by Lhasa and her laughter fuse between the pieces. It is hard to grasp, in the face of such a spirited performance, that this was her last concert: she would die several months later, of cancer, at the age of just 37. © BM/Qobuz