eJazzNews Archive

Singer Lhasa de Sela Passed Away in Her Montreal Home

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By David-Étienne Savoie · Obituaries

On January 5, 2010, eJazzNews published the statement announcing that the singer Lhasa de Sela had died at her home in Montreal on the night of January 1, 2010, after 21 months of illness with breast cancer. She was 37. Known on her records simply as Lhasa, she made three albums in Spanish, French and English between 1997 and 2009, and since her death two more albums have been released from her archive.

What the 2010 statement said

The text was a statement from her manager, David-Étienne Savoie, issued on behalf of her family and friends. It said she died just before midnight and that during her illness she completed her latest album and launched it with concerts at the Théâtre Corona in Montreal and the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Two concerts in Iceland in May, it said, were her last; an international tour planned for autumn 2009 was cancelled, and a planned album of songs by the Chilean songwriters Victor Jara and Violeta Parra would remain unmade.

The statement gave her birth as September 27, 1972, in Big Indian, New York, recalled a childhood spent traveling through Mexico and the United States with her parents and sisters in a school bus, and listed her albums La Llorona (1997), The Living Road (2003) and Lhasa (2009), which it said had sold more than a million copies worldwide. That sales figure was the family’s claim; Wikipedia cites earlier figures of 120,000 copies of La Llorona in Canada and 330,000 in France by 2003. It added that the funeral would be private.

A singer in three languages

Lhasa was the daughter of a Mexican father, Alex Sela, and an American mother, Alexandra Karam. The family crossed North America and Mexico in a converted school bus and the children were taught at home. After her parents separated she lived in San Francisco, and in 1991 she moved to Montreal, where she sang in bars with guitarist Yves Desrosiers. In a recollection published on Audiogram’s artist page, Desrosiers says that at first the two mostly played jazz standards before Latin American songs took over their repertoire.

La Llorona, produced by Desrosiers and released by Audiogram on February 4, 1997, was sung in Spanish. It won a Félix award in Quebec in 1997 and the 1998 Juno for Best Global Album, and was certified platinum in Canada. After touring with Lilith Fair she joined her sisters’ circus troupe, Pocheros, in France and wrote new songs in Marseille. The Living Road (2003) mixed Spanish, French and English, and in 2005 BBC Radio 3 named her best world music artist of the Americas. Lhasa, released April 20, 2009, was sung in English with a smaller band. Accounts of its timing differ: Fred Goodman writes that it was recorded in early 2009 during her treatment, from songs written before she fell ill, while the Guardian’s obituary said it was recorded before the diagnosis.

What happened next

Musicians who had worked with her staged a sold-out memorial concert, “La Route chante,” at the Rialto Theatre in Montreal on January 6, 2012. In May 2014 the city renamed Clark Park in Mile End, at Clark and St-Urbain streets by Van Horne Avenue, as Lhasa de Sela Park, with Patrick Watson, the Barr Brothers and harpist Sarah Pagé performing at the inauguration. Audiogram released Lhasa Live in Reykjavik on December 1, 2017, recorded at the Reykjavik Arts Festival on May 23 and 24, 2009, the Iceland concerts the statement described as her last. Goodman’s book Why Lhasa de Sela Matters followed from the University of Texas Press in 2019, and on September 27, 2024, her birthday, Audiogram issued First Recordings, twelve guitar and voice tracks she cut with Desrosiers in late winter 1994, including “Good Morning Heartache,” “Willow Weep for Me” and “Fever.”

Where to start listening

  • La Llorona (Audiogram, 1997): the Spanish-language debut that won the Félix and the Juno.
  • The Living Road (Audiogram, 2003): her trilingual album, including “Anywhere on This Road.”
  • First Recordings (Audiogram, 2024): the early duo with Desrosiers, mixing Latin American songs and jazz standards.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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