TITAS is presenting a double bill Nov. 13 at the Winspear: Latin Grammy winner Lila Downs and African-Latin-jazz artist Buika (full name, Concha Buika) — who manages to blend flamenco and rhythm and blues. Both singers are making their Dallas debuts — in fact, this is Buika’s first North American tour — so if you want to know more about her, her music and her unusual background (born in Africa, raised on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca in a neighborhood of Spanish Romani — Gitanos or Gypsies), check out today’s NYTimes profile of her:

Among Buika’s most fervent admirers back home [in Spain] is Pedro Almodóvar, the acclaimed director of films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother. He not only created a pair of interludes in his next film, La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I’m In), for her to sing, but also attends her concerts when he can and has written enthusiastically about those performances on his blog.

“Buika belongs to a lineage of artists that is found very rarely,” he wrote after a recent show, before putting her in the same category as Edith Piaf and Judy Garland. “Her voice has an unusual color and a very wide tessitura, gifted for the most intimate caress and for the deafening shriek. Buika only knows how to sing ‘with her heart ripped apart.’ So young, she makes me tremble because she gives the impression that each performance is the definitive one, the last one.”