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Late Bloomer (Concert Preview)
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Ann Arbor News, Late Bloomer (Concert Preview) >>
-by Kevin Ransom
Singer Cesaria Evora may have gotten a late start, but once she captured the imagination of Western audiences, she definitely made up for lost time.
Evora had been singing in her native country of Cape Verde--an island off the coast of Senegal, in Africa--for many years before she officially began her recording career in 1985 at the age of 45. But by the early 1990s, she'd made fans of such pop-culture notables as David Byrne, Bonnie Raitt and Madonna.
Those tastemaker types helped spread the word, and ever since, Evora has enjoyed increasing popularity and acclaim, turning American audiences on to morna, the melancholy Cape Verdean style that expresses the yearning of that nation's people. That yearning comes from the fact that half of Cape Verde's population has been forced by poverty to leave the nation and live abroad--a diaspora was also forced by a long history of colonialism.
Even the more infectious, polyrhythmic songs on Evora's latest release, "Rogamar", convey a plaintive, nostalgic quality. That title conveys some of that wistfulness and the turn to spirituality for comfort: the word "Rogamar" translates to "pray to the sea."
Evora, who comes to the Power Center on Tuesday as part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, has made it her business to spread the word about other world-music figures. She's recorded songs written by Manuel de Novas, Constantino Cardoso and Jojhn Lus from the island of Sao Vincente. And she invited Cape Verdean singer-songwriter-guitarist Tcheka to accompany her on a tour earlier this year. For the Ann Arbor show, Seu Jorge of Brazil opens.
"I began my career late," she acknowledged in a recent interview with the San Francisco chronicle. "But now we have many singers, both women and men, and I think our music is in good hands. Since the colonial period, when we leave the country, we have taken our music and our toots with us."
Mary Catherine Smith, host of the "Brazilian Sol" radio show, which airs Monday nights on WEMU (89.1 FM), describes Evora's music as "gorgeous--it can be lilting, mournful, or happy. Her music is really a melding of traditional AFrican melodies and harmonies with a Portuguese influence, since Cape Verde was a Portuguese colony. And in some of her songs you can hear the same elements you hear in Brazilian music.
"She really is the biggest star in Cape Verde," says Smith, who holds a degree in Brazilian culture from the University of Michigan. "It's a small country, and back there, she is IT--she is their everything." 06/17/07
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