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Shows highlight Fado, iberian Music
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The Seattle Times, Shows highlight Fado, iberian Music >>
No less than three international divas visit the Emerald City this week, including one who spent part of her childhood in Seattle. All three sing in different strains of the Iberian tradition, in particular as inflected by Africa and the Americas. Both Ana Moura and Lura (who goes by one name) hail from Lisbon, but the similarity ends there. Moura sings in the fatalistic style called fado — Portuguese blues, if you will — which allegedly began when sailor's wives wondered aloud if their husbands' ships would ever reappear over the horizon. Lura's music comes from the Atlantic itself, the Cape Verdean Islands, that legendary way station for world voyagers where African, Portuguese and New World traditions crossed in transit.
Americans have enjoyed a decadelong love affair with Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora. Now a new generation of Cape Verdean singers is breaking on our shores, the most recent being Lura, born in 1975, in Lisbon, of Cape Verdean parents. Lura's vivid, infectious 2004 album, "Di Korpu Ku Alma" ("Of Body and Soul"), is quickened by the rolling beats of Congolese and Senegalese pop and includes "Vazulina," a song that decries the internalized racism of Africans straightening their hair with Vaseline. The beats, called "bataku," are an update of "batuque," derived from the rhythms of Cape Verdean washerwomen pounding bundles of cloth.
-Paul de Barros 01/27/06 >> go there
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