Cesaria Evora

Cesaria Evora paid her dues in music long ago. The 65-year-old grandma with the magnificently smoky, bittersweet voice spent her early years in poverty on the parched Cape Verde islands, off West Africa, where she honed her craft singing for dockworkers and sailors in lowlife bars. Since being discovered in the late '80s, however, the "barefoot diva" has become a world-music superstar, selling out venues like New York's Carnegie Hall. On Tuesday (June 12), Evora and her eight-piece band come to the opulent setting of the Orpheum Theatre to perform the bluesy morna and jaunty coladeira rhythms of their homeland, with percussive Cape Verdean guitarist Tcheka opening.