Repackaging a stunning performance by the then-81-year-old Mexican legend, Live at Carnegie Hall defies the listener to put it on a shelf. For starters, the odd-sized digipack won't fit in a standard CD rack. But more important, the glorious artwork, complete with a set of ten lurid postcards, demands that this recording be treasured as the fetish it is no doubt destined to become. That's a canny assessment of Chavela Vargas's fans, who have deified this wizened gender-bender with the ghostly howl. For her Carnegie Hall debut, on Mexican Independence Day in 2003, they were out in full force, including actress Salma Hayek, who introduced the singer. Rarely was an act in less need of an introduction. Vargas could have scowled her way through the Mexico City phone book and met with the same rapturous applause -- but that's how dependable her supernatural connection with listeners is. Verses are whispered, screamed, cajoled, and seduced over the delicate guitar filigrees of her accompanists, Miguel Peña and Juan Carlos Allende. This is not ranchera music the way a hat-act like Vicente Fernandez would render it -- "Volver Volver" and "Se Me Hizo Facil" notwithstanding -- but the song of a ghostly Meso-American wraith that haunts Mexico's European pretensions. When time comes for her trademark "La Llorona," invoking the wandering spirit of legend with whom she has become conflated through her role in Julie Taymor's Frida and in concerts like this one, Vargas burns her admirers, delivering the tune in a harsh whisper. No, this one won't be sitting on any shelf.
