FEBRUARY 4, 2019
"Jazz Album of the Week: Magela Herrera Shines Vocally AND Instrumentally in Debut, Explicaciones"
By Matt Silver

There are great instrumentalists who are adequate vocalists and terrific singers who can play a few notes, but it’s rare to find an artist who does both—play and sing—with virtuosity. Cuban-born flutist and vocalist, Magela Herrera, is one of these musical unicorns. In her debut album as a leading lady, Explicaciones, Herrera lets her versatile musicianship do all the necessary explanation.
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When you listen to the album, you’ll notice that Herrera’s dual talents do not exist in isolation from each other; they profitably co-exist and inform one another. It’s because she sings so well that she’s able to phrase so nicely and cleanly on flute.

Similarly remarkable is Herrera’s ability to simultaneously blend mastery of traditional Cuban and Latin American forms with a penchant for decidedly contemporary arrangements, characterized in no small part by alternating and complex time signatures. For this, see, most notably, her fresh reconstruction of perhaps the most recorded of the traditional boleros, “Besame Mucho.”

FEBRUARY 1, 2019
​"CD Review: Magela Herrera "Explicaciones"
By Music Man Blog