Sosabi: Cape Verdean music from New England

New Internationalist, August, 1999

by Various

(Rounder 5069 CD)

That Cape Verde, the former Portuguese archipelago perched on Africa's Atlantic edges, has always lived a precarious existence caught between geography, history and economics is somehow reflected in its distinctive and haunting music. Cape Verde was once a port used by slave ships en route to the Americas, and its songs are tinged with Latin inflections, soft jazz rumbas and a vocal style dominated by the bitter-sweet and sensuous longings of the blues-like morna tradition. They possess a fierce sense of individuality that makes them shine brightly. There's very rarely any high drama sounded out in explicit drum rolls or vocal flourishes, but the passion can never be doubted.

Cesaria Evora - sixty-something and still magnificently miserable - is Cape Verde's biggest star, but her constellation shouldn't be allowed to outshine her compatriots. Sosabi - Verdean creole for `that's great' - celebrates an extraordinary connection with America, and in particular New England, that continues to the present day. The first Africans to relocate to America of their free will, Verdeans have figured on the eastern seaboard since 1643. As in any relocation, how permanent their exile was intended to be is not easy to say; perhaps it's best to let the music speak for itself. The musicians collected here - Toi Grace, Celina Pereira, Alberto Kinzinhu Rodrigues and others - present the affirmation of a Verdean diaspora as a vibrant entity, where the sadness of dislocation or loss is subsumed under free-floating dance tracks whose smooth rhythms are evidence of a first-hand acquaintance with a Cuban feeling for movement. Sosabi has - make no mistake - first-rate performances and sly, lilting songs that speak much for the fusion of European and African music within a unique identity that's still very much alive.

Politics ***

Entertainment ***

What can one say about Cesaria Evora, the undoubted `queen of the morna', that hasn't been said already? A magic happens when Evora, Cape Verde's barefoot diva, opens her mouth. For over 40 years, this cigarette-smoking, whisky-drinking granny has made into an art from the slow modulations of morna and their poetic heart. Like the best of divas, she personifies depth and resilience with - it has to be said - a sharp humour that sometimes beggars belief.

The images conjured up in: `The first time/That I went to Ribeira Grande/I had a wild time/In a goods storeroom,' is just hilarious. Cafe Atlantico is a fiction of an imaginary cafe at the end of the world, a place for ruined lovers, late-night revellers and, perhaps, those at the end of their tethers. Evora's voice has the best smoky ambience to set the scenes and a majestic band to go with it. In fact, there's very little that's really lugubrious about this album: a fabulous ten-piece Cuban band lays down a fiery pace that makes Cafe Atlantico an album to cherish until the end of time.

Politics ***

Entertainment ****