Clara Sanabras
Meet multi-talented Clara Sanabras
JOURNALISTS STRUGGLE WITH CLARA SANABRAS. Reviews of her albums have compared her music to that of husky jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux, French beatbox vocalist Camille and folk-inspired harpist Joanna Newsom. The ability to avoid casual pigeonholing began at birth: she was born in Rouen, France and grew up in Barcelona with Catalan parents whose family tree included a Sioux Indian and whole branches of bona fide gypsies. Sanabras then moved to London, aged 17, to take up a place at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama – despite not speaking a word of English. ‘I got through it somehow,’ she says. ‘Music is an international language.’ She’s been in London ever since, where she says she finds ‘the open-mindedness really refreshing’.
She studied singing but learned to play the oud (Arabic lute) to accompany herself, going on to master a whole variety of obscure stringed instruments. Although she says she’s no virtuoso, her ability to play particular period instruments has led to some intriguing sessions. She appeared – ‘for a split second’ – onscreen as a street musician alongside Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice and played charango (a small Andean guitar, traditionally made with the shell of an armadillo) for Jarvis Cocker on a song for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. ‘I don’t know if it ever got used because I never saw the film,’ she says. ‘But I came out of the session and there was Robert Plant and I had a really fantastic conversation with him because he’s really into weird instruments.’
And if people have trouble working out where her music fits, she’s happy with that: ‘I would hate for somebody to say, “Well, she’s a bit like so-and-so.” What I hope is that people will say there is nobody like Clara Sanabras.’ Andrew Humphreys Clara’s latest album The Emblem is out in January
