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Critic's Choice - CD Review
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Critic's choice: New CDs
'BALANCE' (Times Square)
Sara Tavares
What's left of Portugal's former empire are scattered strongholds of the Portuguese language and a geography- defying musical kinship that binds a good part of Portuguese-speaking pop. Sara Tavares was born in Portugal to a family with roots in the Cape Verde islands off Senegal, and on her album "Balance," she presents Lisbon as a creolized city, a musical hub for Portugal, its former colonies and some of their neighbors in Africa and the Americas.
She draws ideas from Cape Verde, Angola, Brazil and Portugal itself; "De Nua" puts drumbeat behind the Arab-Iberian quavers of a guest Portuguese fado singer, Ana Moura. Tavares' positive-thinking lyrics, calling for love and kindness, are in Portuguese sprinkled with English and African words.
She lets one song hint - not too heavy-handedly at reggae, another at Rickie Lee Jones. And her voice can caress phrases with the breathy ease of a Brazilian pop singer or take on a sharper African edge. But she never forces anything. Fusions that could easily turn out to be self-conscious and contrived turn out sounding supple and spontaneous instead.
Tavares, who was born in 1978, is no novice. She won pop contests on Portuguese television and sang funk and gospel before turning toward African styles; Lokua Kanza, a Congo lese Parisian, produced her second album. "Balance" is her third, and Tavares not only produced it herself, she also picked and plucked many of the layered, syncopated acoustic guitar vamps that make the music dance. The songs glide by with the cosmopolitan poise of woman who can find the world in her hometown.
-JON PARELES
06/30/06 >> go there
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