Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010), also known by the mononym

Lhasa, was an American-born singer-songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the
United States and divided her adult life between Canada and France.

Lhasa was born in Big Indian, New York, of a Mexican father, Spanish instructor
Alex Sela, and a Lebanese-Jewish-American mother, photographer and actress
Alexandra Karam. Her first decade was spent criss-crossing the United States and
Mexico in a converted school bus with her parents and siblings, home-schooled by
her mother.

She started singing in a Greek cafe in San Francisco when she was thirteen. Aged
19, she moved to Montreal, and sang for five years in bars, where she developed the
material that eventually became her first album, La Llorona, released in 1997. La
Llorona, which mixes traditional Latin American songs with original songs, was
strongly influenced by Mexican music, but also Klezmer music, Eastern European
gypsy music, Middle-Eastern music and alternative rock. The album was released by
the Canadian independent record label, Audiogram, in Montreal, and brought her much
success, including the Quebec Félix Award in Canada for "Artiste québécois —
musique du monde" in 1997 and a Canadian Juno Award for Best Global Artist in 1998.

After touring in Europe and North America for several years, Lhasa left her singing
career in 1999 and moved to France to join her sisters in Pocheros, a
circus/theatre company. She eventually reached Marseille, where she started writing
songs again. She then returned to Montreal to produce her second album, The Living
Road, which was released in 2003. While La Llorona had been entirely in Spanish,
The Living Road included songs in English, French and Spanish.

A two year tour followed the release of The Living Road, taking her and her group
to seventeen countries. She was a guest singer on the Tindersticks' track
"Sometimes It Hurts" off their Waiting for the Moon album, and later joined
Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples for a duet on the track "That Leaving Feeling",
found on his Leaving Songs album. She also appeared as a guest on the albums of
French singers Arthur H and Jérôme Minière, and the French gypsy music group
Bratsch. She received the BBC World Music Award for Best Artist of the Americas in
2005. The accumulated worldwide sales of her two albums are nearing one million.

De Sela's third album Lhasa was released in April 2009 in Canada and Europe, and
the next month in the U.S. She could also be heard on the title track of Patrick
Watson's album Wooden Arms.

Following a 21-month-long battle with breast cancer, Lhasa died, age 37, on the
evening of January 1, 2010, at her home in Montreal. On January 16, Jim Corcoran
devoted an episode of his CBC Radio One program À Propos, a weekly show about
Quebec music, to a Lhasa tribute show.

Discography

* 1997 – La Llorona (Audiogram/Atlantic)

* 2003 – The Living Road (Audiogram/Nettwerk)
* 2009 – Lhasa (Nettwerk)

Filmography

* 1997 – El Desierto
* 2005 – Con toda palabra
* 2009 – Rising
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhasa_de_Sela
http://lhasadesela.com/
http://www.sendereando.com/