A Calm, Serene Presence From Islands of Nostalgia

- By Jon Pareles

In an uptempo song near the end of Cesária Évora’s set on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, her saxophonist, Totinho, swaggered toward her with arms outstretched, as if inviting her to dance. She gave him one dismissive glance, and he returned to his microphone. Ms. Évora was maintaining the core of her music: a serene, pensive stillness.

Ms. Évora is the best-known singer from Cape Verde, the parched islands off the coast of Senegal that were part of the Portuguese empire. Since the outside world discovered her in the 1990s, she has established herself as the queen of morna, the minor-key Cape Verdean ballads suffused with “sodade” (nostalgic longing). That word often appears in the lyrics about lost love, the emigration that separates many Cape Verdean families and, on the material that filled her set from her 2006 album “Rogamar” (Lusafrica/Sony BMG), the sea.

Her music hasn’t changed since she made her international breakthrough by accompanying mornas with acoustic instruments. Her voice is low, rich, consoling and unshowy as she circles through a song’s melody, placing a little vibrato on longer notes, often repeating the same verse again and again. The songs don’t seek drama or change; they linger within a mood, shifting briefly from minor to major chords before sinking back into sodade.

Her band — an eight-man group that sounds smaller — puts a lilt in the songs with light strumming from the ukulele-like cavaquinho and the whisper of brushes on drums, while violin and saxophone answer Ms. Évora’s voice with lightly teasing responses, as if insisting all is not sadness. Totinho’s solos were improvisational: moving the melody around the beat, adding passing tones and jazz flourishes, revealing what Ms. Évora does not do.

Ms. Évora, 65, looked like a Yoda of melancholy onstage, calm and serious. She alternated slow mornas with slightly faster songs that touched on other Cape Verdean rhythms like funaná and coladeira. At first the formula of the songs was most obvious. But gradually, through her obstinate stillness, the mood took over. The songs became meditations on home, memory, patience and loss. And at the end — after a reflective version of “Bésame Mucho” — she picked up the tempo for “Sangue de Beirona” (“Blood of Beirona”), hinting at carnival and finally allowing herself a smile.

Where Ms. Évora conjured earth and water, the opening band, the Bird and the Bee, was another element: air, from Inara George’s girlish high voice to arrangements that revolved around Greg Kurstin’s tinkly electric piano. The Bird and the Bee looks back to light 1960s pop — they played “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” — via the mathematical patterns of Stereolab, with melodies that often make unlikely leaps. The breezy eccentricities of the tunes often hold lyrics about frustrated yearning and obsessive love, transformed into wry, weightless music.

Since the concert was part of the JVC Jazz Festival New York, Ms. George and Mr. Kurstin tried the standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” pitched in the ozone layer of her voice. Its awkwardness just showed how poised, and perfectly tailored, their own songs were.