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Q and A Feature: Tonight's Top Stop: Sara Tavares
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Express, Q and A Feature: Tonight's Top Stop: Sara Tavares >>
By: Christopher Porter
Sara Tavares is a Portuguese singer-songwriter of Cape Verdean ancestry who's in touch with her African roots. All those influences and more come to bear on her fantastic 2006 CD, "Balance" (Times Square Records), which mixes the longing of fado music and the lilting sensuality of Brazilian styles with a jazzy, alt-soul sound that wouldn't seem out of place on an Indie.Arie or Cassandra Wilson album.
Tavares brings her guitar and voice, as well as a guitar-bass-drums trio, to the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage for a free concert tonight at 6 p.m.
» EXPRESS: One of the things that's really appealing about "Balance" is its diversity. Brazilian bossa nova and Portuguese fado can sometimes feel so "of the genre" that they become tiring to listeners who don't understand the nuances, or the language and the cultures they come from. But in your music, I hear American pop, soul and jazz — Rickie Lee Jones, Indie.Arie, Cassandra Wilson.
» TAVARES: Ever since I started to compose I was always trying to put all of that together. It's a little bit of history of Africans in the world — we're all in the diaspora, and we've all influenced each other ever since slavery, with all the traveling, with all the exodus in the world. So being born and raised in Lisbon in our African community there — but I've been growing up in a globalized world, with world culture coming into our home through radio and TV, and American black music was a great influence and a great reference for me.
» EXPRESS: Who did you listen to?
» TAVARES: All the stuff from Stevie Wonder's generation all the way up to Whitney Houston, I was listening to it — especially the Motown stuff. I was poor and I didn't have money to buy recent CDs, so I would go to the store and buy the very old stuff: Nat "King" Cole, Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, and it was a great thing for me, a great influence. So I think I probably listened to the same things Indie.Arie and Lauryn Hill listened to, too, so maybe [we have] some of the same influences. And then looking back to Africa, to where my parents came from — the Cape Verde islands — and listening to all that, and studying it, and traveling back there. All my African friends in Lisbon, we have a big community of people from not only Cape Verde but also all the ex-Portuguese colonies — Angola, Mozambique. All of this music has a lot in common — especially that the main language is Portuguese, but then you have all these dialects. For the Lusophone world — the Portuguese-speaking culture — the Brazilian culture is the most well known in the world, but I wouldn't say it's an influence because we all have the same roots, but it's a reference. All the people like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil — they were like revolutionaries, fighting for the recognition of their own identities in the world of their contemporary culture. All of that was a great motivation and reference for me.
» EXPRESS: People like Veloso and Gil were well known for the political stances they took in their music, but your music seems to be more about personal matters and affairs of the heart.
» TAVARES: The elements that I'm using in my music — the fact that I speak Portuguese slang; the fact that I mix a Cape Verdean rhythm with a reggae rhythm or a very folk Portuguese sort of melody, I think that's making an affirmation about a social reality. It's not so much about politics, but politics is sometimes about [socialization], too. [The songs] are a lot about love and self-esteem, but they're about stimulating my community to stand up and be who they are and really share that with the world. Portugal is very small, and all of these countries I've told you about — Cape Verde and Angola — they're very poor, and they have this thing about being eternally colonized by outside culture. They just take it and hardly ever give back. So my album is also sort of a shout out for all my colleagues in culture to say, "Come on, let's give back, because we have a lot to give back to."
» EXPRESS: Is your CD almost a celebration of creolized culture?
» TAVARES: [Traditional] Cape Verdean music is still very much alive, traditions — people like Cesaria Evora are doing a lot for that. I would say that this [CD] is about us, the generation born and raised in the diaspora, on the outside, about integrating ourselves into the present world. Because sometimes we feel pressure to lose half of our culture, either the African one or the Portuguese one — to say, "I'm African" or "I'm European" only. It's about us, the ones who are outside, having our own roots, too.
» Kennedy Center, Millennium Stage, 2700 F St. NW; 6 p.m., free; 202-467-4600. (Foggy Bottom-GWU) 01/23/07 >> go there
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