Identity is critical in pop music. Some stars, like Madonna and David Bowie, built their whole careers by adopting and shedding a series of characters and postures, actors in their own lives.

But constructing a persona doesn't have to be a performance strategy. Sometimes it can evolve as part of an authentic quest. Such is the case for Lura, a young, vi brant Portuguese vocalist who, by embracing her roots, has brought new vitality to very old sounds.

" I relate to my heritage by the fact that I am black and I am African." she says, speaking recently via translator from her home in Lisbon. "It's been a soul-searching process to come back to how identify myself."

Lura's third album, Di Korpu Ku Alma ("Of Body and Soul"), draws deeply on the singer's connection to Cape Verde, a string of tiny islands off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Both her parents were born there, where European colonizers have been mixing with the local African cultures since 1462.

The performer made her 1996 debut with an album of Haitian- style zouk, and followed six years later with an R&B-accented project sung in English. A subsequent tour with Cesaria Evora, the grand dame of Cape Verdean music, was turning point. "It was important for me to see how she works, to see her dignity. I was very proud of that," Lura says. "I was still in the process of finding my place, and it helped me to reach that."

What Lura was looking for turned out to be the traditional music her father knew, which came from Santiago, Cape Verde. Profoundly African, these forms- such as funana and batuku have not been represented as widely as the more familiar (and European) mornas and coladeras popularized by Evora.

"Growing up, I wasn't terribly conscious of these," Lura says, her voice dark and hearty, "but later on, I listened and realized that this is very happy music. It's dance music. And the message in the lyrics is important." Batuku came into being when groups of women would collectively drum a rhythm, using their hands and stacks of clothes, while a singer

freely rhymed words that commented on current, local events.

"It's the oldest form," says Lura, whose use of batuku is far more stylized than its bare-bone origins, with catchy melodic choruses and elegant acoustic guitars setting up her declarative vocals. "It was sung by African slaves brought to Cape Verde. It was a format for women to be happy and joyous, but also it was a conduit for political discussion, so it was prohibited in 1866." Lura's album serves as an unofficial tribute to Orlando Pantera, modern poet of the batuku style, who died in 2001. She features five of Pantera's songs, which she discovered while researching Cape Verdean traditional music. "Listening to him, I realized I didn't want to do the more typical music," she says. "I found a way that I wanted to represent myself and the culture, especially in his lyrics, which are about the daily life of the Cape Verdean person."

Though this sounds rather serious and ethno-musicological, most of Korpu is rousing, sensual, ass- shaking music. There are songs about revolution and struggle, but it's a revolution you can dance to. On several tracks, Lura deploys the funana a party music that is popular in the Cape Verdean communities of Portugal. Driven by accordion and accented by percussive scraping on corrugated metal, it's distant cousin of Louisiana zydeco and Northern Brazilian forro. Lura's version does not sound as the instrumentation is more but nonetheless it speaks a populist tongue: "They say the world's going to end," she sings in a creole of African and Portuguese. "I don't think so."

With her sultry stage presence, Lura fully embodies this sexually charged form. Naturally, it was considered a threat to the social order and once was outlawed in Cape Verde.

"It was necessary because it was too erotic," Lura says, with a robust laugh. "Men and women dancing face-to-face, very close to each other. It wasn't shameful for the Africans, but for the Portuguese [colonists]. The white people were in charge and the black people listened."

Lura performs this week as part of the World Music Festival. See "Global beats," page 102.