COMPOSERS: Various
LABELS: BMG
PERFORMER: Cesaria Evora (vocals), etc
CATALOGUE NO: 74321 73667 2
Virtually a one-woman cultural export policy, the superb CESARIA EVORA continues to sing her native Cape Verde Islands into the world’s hearts. The place is a piece of offshore Africa whose colonial past leaves it with music that sounds strangely Latin-American, especially with today’s global cross-currents.
Several songs in Evora’s latest album are like Cuban music sung in Portuguese, not only the ones with guest appearances from Chucho Valdes or Orquesta Aragòn. As usual the voice’s deep, resonant, tragic serenity carries all before. There’s a wide diversity of colour and rhythm, though the high point is ‘Negue’, accompanied by Valdes’s free-flowing piano with an intimate perfection that Lieder recitalists would die for.