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Eliana Cuevas & Jorge Glem “Mi Pequeña” Album Review: A Loving Tribute to Venezuelan Song
Released on Lulaworld Records and built around a close creative partnership with Latin Grammy-winning cuatro virtuoso Jorge Glem, the album is less a showcase of new songwriting than an act of devotion: nine songs from Venezuela’s musical memory, handled with the kind of care usually reserved for family heirlooms.
Cuevas has spent much of her recording career writing her own material, building a catalogue that’s earned her a Canadian National Jazz Award for Latin Jazz Artist of the Year, two Toronto Independent Music Awards, an Independent Music Award for Best Latin Album, and a World Solo Artist of the Year Award at the Canadian Folk Music Awards, alongside years of international touring and collaborations with Grammy and Juno winners.
Mi Pequeña marks a departure from that pattern of original composition and, in a sense, a homecoming. Instead of writing new songs, she returns to the ones that shaped her: staples of Venezuelan repertoire by writers like Simón Díaz, Henry Martínez, and Luis Laguna, songs she’s carried since childhood and clearly still holds close.
What keeps the album from ever feeling like a nostalgia exercise is the way Cuevas and Glem treat this material, not as museum pieces to be preserved under glass, but as living songs still capable of surprising their listeners. Produced by multiple JUNO Award-winner Jeremy Ledbetter, the record favours intimacy over spectacle throughout. Every arrangement decision seems built to clear space for the songs’ poetry rather than to draw attention to itself.
If Cuevas’s voice is the album’s emotional throughline, Jorge Glem’s cuatro is its constant conversation partner, and it’s worth pausing on just how remarkable that partnership is. Glem is widely regarded as one of the great ambassadors of the Venezuelan cuatro on the world stage: a founding member of the Latin Grammy-winning C4 Trío, a musician who has shared stages with artists as varied as Rubén Blades, Carlos Vives, and Paquito D’Rivera, and someone who has performed cuatro concertos with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. Few players have done as much to push the instrument beyond its folkloric roots and into jazz, salsa, bluegrass, and beyond, without ever losing the intimacy that makes the cuatro what it is.
That range is exactly what Mi Pequeña draws on. Rather than sit in the background, Glem’s playing becomes a second storyteller across the record, sometimes rhythmic and propulsive, sometimes achingly tender, always alert to what Cuevas is saying in the moment. It’s a true duet of voice and instrument, each given room to lead and to answer, which is precisely what elevates this record above a simple songbook of covers.
Underneath the album’s warmth sits a quiet grief. Mi Pequeña is dedicated to the memory of guitarist and composer Aquiles Báez, a mentor and friend whose generosity left a lasting mark on Cuevas’s musical life, and whose own composition gives the album its title track. That loss isn’t confined to a single song, it shapes the record’s entire tone, turning what could have been a straightforward collection of classics into something closer to a conversation with someone no longer there to answer back. Cuevas has spoken about wanting to create an album celebrating the beauty of these songs so that listeners might discover them and keep returning to them, and in Báez’s absence, that act of passing music forward takes on extra weight.
That the album arrives while Venezuela itself faces such profound difficulty only sharpens its purpose. Mi Pequeña isn’t a political statement, but it doesn’t need to be one to function as an act of love for a culture under strain, a reminder that heritage survives distance, hardship, and time as long as someone keeps singing it.
The album opens with its title track, “Mi Pequeña,” Báez’s own composition and the emotional anchor for everything that follows. “La Partida” and “El Becerrito” draw from the deep well of Simón Díaz’s songbook, arguably Venezuela’s most beloved composer of tonada and folk repertoire, and Cuevas treats both with real reverence. “Cambur Pintón,” written by Glem himself, gives the cuatro player a rare moment to step forward as composer as well as accompanist. “El Diablo Suelto,” a joropo standard so central to Venezuelan identity it’s sometimes called the country’s unofficial second anthem, gets a performance that honors its rhythmic fire while still fitting the album’s intimate frame. The closing pair, “El Cuatro Venezolano”, Cuevas’s own tribute to the instrument at the album’s heart, and the album’s featured single, and “Motivos,” send the record out on a note of gratitude rather than grandeur.
Mi Pequeña succeeds precisely because it doesn’t try too hard. There’s no reinvention for its own sake here, no attempt to modernize these songs beyond recognition, just two extraordinary artists giving beloved material the space to breathe and letting their evident love for it do the rest. For listeners new to Venezuelan song, it’s a warm and generous introduction. For those who already know these melodies by heart, it’s a chance to hear them anew, carried by a voice and a cuatro that clearly understand exactly what they’re carrying, and why it matters.
An album that unleashes a torrent of sensations, overwhelming you with emotion, especially given recent events in Venezuela. An album whose charm will light up your heart and soul.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 13th, 2026
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Eliana Cuevas on Lulaworld Records’ website
Tracklisting:
- Mi Pequeña (Aquiles Báez)
- La Partida (Simón Díaz/Carlos Bonet)
- Venme a Buscar (Henry Martínez)
- El Becerrito (Simón Díaz)
- Cambur Pintón (Jorge Glem)
- El Diablo Suelto (Heraclio Fernández & Enrique Hidalgo)
- Un Heladero con Clase (Luis Laguna)
- El Cuatro Venezolano (Eliana Cuevas)
- Motivos (Italo Pizzolante)
Personnel:
Vocals – Eliana Cuevas
Piano – Eliana Cuevas, Jeremy Ledbetter (track 7)
Cuatro – Jorge Glem
Production Team:
Produced by Jeremy Ledbetter
Executive Producer Eliana Cuevas
Recorded by Jeremy Ledbetter at GMP Studios
Mixed by John Bailey at Drive Shed Recording Studios
Mastered by Harry Hess
Photography by Pasky Photography
Album Design by Kurt Firla