|
|
 |
Feature / Concert Preview
|
| Click Here to go back. |
The Intelligencer, Feature / Concert Preview >>
-by Nalia Francis
Richly Compelling
In discovering the musical herritage of her parents' Cape Verde, Portuguese singer Lura also found her musical voice.
To get Lura to speak about the music of her ancestral Cape Verde is something that at once delights and frustrates the singer.
It is a music that iconic vocalist Cesaria Evora brought to the world's attention, with her expressively rendered momas - one of the country's classic musical traditions - and yet it is so much more, expanding beyond that scope to explore the African-influenced ehythms of the 10-island archipelago.
It is a music as rich in story as it is in texture, gliding and undulating along a heady soundscape of European and African influences, with traditional instruments such as cavaquinho, a small four-string Portuguese instrument, and the tchabeta, a tightly wrapped ball placed between the legs and used as a drum, casting the arrangements of percussion and guitar, cello and violin and even the Fender Rhodes in vibrant shades of warmth.
While Lura admits that her English is not the best, this is not the barrier that keeps her from expressing what she wishes to communicate. "It's something more (of the) soul, more spiritual," she says of the music of Santiago, the largest and most African of the islands, where her father is from, and Santo Antao, her mother's homeland. "It's something you can feel, not something you can see, and when you live with the people and you are with the people, you feel the smell of the country, you feel the feelings - it's a question of feelings."
And so her songs span the many moods of the land and its people, illuminating their eveiyday lives with rhythms that move from the mellow and gently stirring to the passionate and jubilant, the latter accom modating her love of dancing and the hip-swiveling sinuous- ness with which her athletic body moves on stage. The clas sic influences of morna and a swifter, more sensual style of music than the for mer remain. But on her lat est album, "M'bem di fora" ("I've come from far away"), the songs also explore the improvi- sational batuku, a rhythm par ticular to Santiago once played by slave women, and the accor dion-based, uptempo funana, styles that were at one time sup pressed by the colonial govern ment which had outlawed the drums as being too crude and suggestive.
If Evora brought the classic folk sounds of Cape Verde to the world, then Lura is turning the spotlight on the rhythms of the countryside where her parents grew up - but Evora's influence looms large in her work.
"She's a very important woman for me and for Cape Verdean people. Cesaria she sings the rhythms of her coun try, Sao Vicente. I was born out side of Cape Verde and I feel that I can sing the different rhythms of all the islands," she says. "My father is from an island, my mother is from another island, so I feel it's pos sible to do every style from every island in a CD."
Despite the obvious passion with which she speaks about the country, Lura herself was born in Lisbon, Portugal where she still lives and never even set foot on Cape Verde until she was 21. But she grew up in a Cape Verdean community more Cape Verdeans live abroad than at home. immersed in the cul ture on which her parents were reared.
"It was later that I knew Cape Verde personally, but all my life, I ate Cape Verdean foods, I lis tened to Cape Verdean music and I learned Creole, the lan guage of Cape Verde at the school with my friends," says Lura, who began singing at 17.
A love for water and water sports led her to study to be swim teacher, but while taking a dance class with an African dancer, Juka, in Lisbon, she was asked to be one of the backup singers on his first album. Even though she'd never sung before, she was soon asked to perform duet with him instead.
"The first time was some thing new and strange for me," recalls Lura, who performs Wednesday at the KimmcT Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. "After that, it was a good surprise, listening to my voice, listening to some thing different, a very nice sound from my body, from me. Wow! It was a new experience for me, very nice."
Soon, she began working with other musicians, lending her velvety vocals to their proj ects before releasing her first album primarily a dance album of zouk and rhythm and blues in 1996. Her second album, "In Love," followed similar route, with Ky-Mani Marley, one of Bob Marley's sons performing on several of the tracks. She released "Di Korpu Ku Alma" ("Of Body and Soul") in 2004, the first album to truly shine a light on Cape Verde's musical heritage. By then, Lura had had the chance to spend some time in the country, visiting the lands of her parents. She initially went there to sing with a group of musicians before she was able to return with her siblings and her mother, who had always dreamed of showing her children the place where she grew up.
For Lura, the visits proved enriching on many levels.
"It was amazing. It was very important for me to grow up little more, like a woman, like an African singer. I could say, 'OK, now I know where is the country of my mother,' " she says. "I know the streets. know the people. I was with the musicians. I learned to be more African. I learned to be more female. I learned that the most important thing is to sing what is yours because before I tried to sing soul but it is not my origin, and I learned this, too learned that I have to sing the soul of my soul, not of another soul."
She feels "M'bem di fora" speaks even more profoundly to her experiences there, whether she is singing about the diffi culties surviving in an economy of frequent droughts, or the expectations many . mothers have of marrying their daugh ters off to immigrants in the hopes that they'll have a better life. She can be plaintive when singing of the heartbreak and limitations of living in Cape Verde, but she is celebratory and flirtatious, too, singing of festivals and parties and the compelling rhythms of the fiinana and paying tribute to the sincere nature of those, like her parents, who come from the rural areas of the country.
"This is more mature," says Lura of her fourth album. "I think it's because, now, I know Cape Verde a little better than before so the first time, in the first album, it was like a passion I fell in love with Cape Verde and wanted to do everything about Cape Verde. It still felt new. Now, I'm more calm. I'm more Cape Verdean. I know about what I'm singing."
But though the album may sometimes paint a bleak pic ture, she wants listeners to know the place of her roots is not all sorrow and suffering.
"In Cape Verde, we are poor but we have culture. We have good poets, we have good singers, we have people who are very important to the society, good people who are very intel ligent," she says. "I want people to feel that we are a poor coun try but with many reasons to smile. Our country is poor, but our culture is rich."
Sound Stage appears every Thursday. NaKa Francis can be reached art (215) 345-3149 or nfrancis@phillyBurbs.com
IF YOU GO
Who: Lura
Where: Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 260 S. Broad St., Philadelphia
When: 7:30pm Wednesday
Tickets: $31 to $44
Information: (215) 790-5800 or (215) 893-1999; www.kimmelcenter.org; www.luracriola.com
Hear her:
http://www.luracriola.com/video/ponciana/index.html
04/05/07
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
