Sara Tavares sings about balance--but not the kind you can train for in a gym or read about on a nutrition bar label.

In the Portuguese hip-hop-influenced slang the 28-year-old uses, "balance" means dancing and swing. And for Tavares, one of the hottest Cape Verdean artists in the world, it means even more.

"For me, the process of doing the 'Balance' album was about finding my own personal swing amidst all the other swings that inhabit me," said Tavares, who performs tomorrow at Berklee Performance Center.

"Being from Cape Verde but being raised in Lisbon, I was influenced by  having experienced many different things in life," she said in fluent English from her Lisbon home. "I want to have all of them in my music."

Tavares succeeds in a big way, one that's different and far more contemporary than one of her heroes, Cesaria Evora. While there's plenty of classic coladeira rhythm coursing through Tavares'  songs, it's just as easy to hear the sounds of the modern world: electronica, Afrobeat, samba, reggae, even a hip-hop beat or two.

They're styles she became familiar with working with African artists in Portugal and during her travels to such countries as Haiti and Zimbabwe. She said the styles help ground her in a way that makes her feel as if she has a home: the global community.

Born to second-generation Cape Verdean immigrants, Tavares' mother and father moved out of her life at a young age. She was raised by an older Portuguese woman in Lisbon.

"I was raised in the diaspora outside of (Cape Verde)," she said about the scattering of native culture and language she and thousands of others of Cape Verdean descent -- including many in Massachusetts -- have experienced. ""That's why I feel that we need to distinguish who we are."

For Tavares, that means making clear through her music that she's a member of the new generation of Cape Verdeans.

She started singing in church and still praises the Lord in many of her ballads. And while she admits hip-hop is an integral part of her generation's culture, it's not at the center of her life.

The exception: the lyrics of hope and celebration she sings in Crioulo, the slang dialect of Portuguese and Creole that she spices with hip-hop flavor.

When I was in my early 20s I started listening to a lot of Cape Verdean music, reading the literature and paying attention to the arts and politics and history," she said. "It's a mix of what I've been brought up with musically and my inner process of finding my identity."

That identity, for Tavares, starts with liberation.

"(My music) is a lot about finding one's self, and about freedom in yourself," she said. "It's about saying that each human being is unique in their own way, and beautiful in their own right. I'm celebrating that in my music."

-by Bob Young