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LURA (CAPE VERDE)
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BBC Awards for World Music, LURA (CAPE VERDE) >>
If at first you don't succeed, try and try again, as they say. Although thirty-year-old Maria de Lurdes Pina Assunçao has been singing for nearly half her life, recognition beyond the ex-pat Cape Verdean community of Lisbon she was born into has only recently become a reality.
Key to understanding her appeal is to see her onstage, where her warm, communicative manner, hip-swivelling dances and mellow voice make for a winning combination. Good looks and a very natural dress sense don't seem to have hindered her, either. Perhaps most crucially, as part of a new wave of younger performers currently emerging from Cape Verde and its diaspora cultures in the US and Europe, Lura brings a fresh outsider perspective to the traditional music of her ancestral isles, looking beyond familiar morna and coladeira popularised worldwide over the last two decades.
'In Cape Verde there are many more styles. There is the tabanka, the mazurca, the cola, São João, and these are the kind of things I would like to explore on my next album,' she says with a radiant smile. Her third and most recent CD Di Korpu ku Alma ('Of body and soul') explores the more African side of her heritage through rhythms like the funana and, in particular, the batuku. That's meant developing a sideline in indigenous percussion instruments like the ferrinho (metal scraper) and the tchabeta, a cushion by any other name, which have become part of a live act that borders on 'edutainment' at times. With her European upbringing and background in zouk and R&B, she adds a pop sensibility all her own, which comes through in her song writing.
The most surprising thing about Lura is that she had never even set foot on the islands her parents had emigrated from until she was 21. Once there, though, things she'd heard and heard about made a lot more sense, greatly shaping her future direction. And with old school Cape Verdean stalwart Toy Vieira directing her new touring band, she's in good hands, freer than ever now to take her music to the wider world.
11/15/06 >> go there
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