Very often, posthumous albums of previously unreleased songs are described as unexpected pearls or narrowly surviving treasures. But the fact that Mãe Carinhosa, Cesaria Evora’s twelfth studio album, was released a year after her death will soon be forgotten. On it, the Cape Verdean singer brings us classics from the archipelago’s repertoire, new songs - heartbreaking mornas and bright coladeras - and nods to Latin America and the timeless atmosphere of piano bars in every port the world over.
Mãe Carinhosa is Cesaria’s final gift to us after something of a miraculous international career. Before Cesaria, only geographers, sailors or Cape Verdeans knew the location of Cape Verde, an archipelago that lies a few hundred kilometers off the coast of Senegal and was formerly colonized by the Portuguese.
En 1987, Cesaria was forty-six and still singing for a few crumpled bills in the bars of Cape Verde’s capital, Mindelo, when José Da Silva, a Frenchman of Cape Verdean origin, told her that he wanted to produce her songs. Cesaria slowly mastered the Western scene. Her first achievement was to win over the French public. The great breakthrough came in 1992 with Sodade and Angola, the two “hits” from her Miss Perfumado album. Now Cesaria’s star was firmly in the ascendant. She sang all over the world. Her irresistible voice conquered hearts everywhere. This was the beginning of a fairytale unique in the history of popular music - one that would last almost twenty years. Cesaria was awarded Victoires de la Musique prizes and the Légion d'Honneur in France, and a Grammy Award® in the United States. Her records went gold all over the world. She now had the outlandish honor of being more famous than her native country. The Cape Verdean government gave her a diplomatic passport and put her face on its stamps.
Star? Anti-star? Does it matter? She was destined for world fame. The Barefoot Diva’s story was a fascinating one. Critics acclaimed her as one of the all-time greats, alongside Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf and Umm Kulthum. The temptation to compare her rise to Bob Marley’s was irresistible. An obscure island, music loved equally in the West and the Third World… This was a kind of payback for peoples formerly excluded from the chapters of world history. Music lovers were overwhelmed by emotion, from country to country and album to album.
And now Mãe Carinhosa is here to prolong the enchantment. It is not really a posthumous album, more a normal one - recorded like all the others with the same passion and hunger. What the general public did not realize is that during the twenty or so years that Cesaria Evora spent touring the world, selling more than six million records, she systematically recorded more tracks than were needed for each new album. This was for two reasons.
First, the wealth of choice she enjoyed, with songs from the repertoires of the great masters of the past and works from the young songwriters she inspired.
Then there was the extraordinary nature of Cesaria’s albums. Each record was a journey, with its own atmosphere, consistency and tone. The aim was to provide her fans with superb, flawless albums they could enjoy again and again from the first track to the last. This meant that drawing up the tracklist was a subtle exercise in proportion and balance, ruling out many of the songs the singer recorded. One track might seem too similar to another on the album, while the next did not fit in with the whole.
Without deliberately hoarding tracks, Cesaria’s team gradually built up a collection of songs that had never featured on any of her albums, many of them fully orchestrated and mixed.
When she died on December 17, 2011, nobody initially thought of turning this treasure trove of unreleased songs into an album. However, the strength of feeling expressed in tributes to the singer (an audience of six thousand at a special event at the Rio Loco festival in Toulouse and three sellout dates at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris) showed just how loyal her fans were. José Da Silva had remained her producer until the last. He was bombarded with suggestions for projects to fill the void left by her death: cover albums, prestige tributes and so on. He finally decided that the best idea would be to give the world a new album of songs that it had never heard before.
The aim was the same as for all Cesaria’s albums: the record was to be a journey of a dozen songs fitting seamlessly together with no repetition. They had to convey all the enchantment of her voice, but still hold surprises. Work on Mãe Carinhosa was no simpler or easier than the production of the eleven studio albums that had gone before. There was just one difference: the singer herself would no longer be involved. The material was not recorded in the space of a few weeks or months as usual, but spanned different recording sessions - from Cabo Verde in 1997 to Rogamar in 2005. Half the songs were already fully orchestrated and mixed when José Da Silva began work on the album last summer.
He wanted just one thing: to give Cize a new album - one that would do her honor, one she would have liked. And unintentionally, he found himself bringing back together her songwriting guard of honor. Many of the tracks he chose were by the “veterans” B. Leza (the superb mornas Dor di Sodade and Talvez), Manuel de Novas (the stunning Cmê Catchôrr), Epifania Evora (the great Tututa, one of the few women to write mornas, including Sentimento, the album’s opening track), Gregorio Gonçalves and Frank Cavaquinho. Others were from the younger generation of Cape Verdean musicians, who owed their fame to Cesaria: Teofilo Chantre, with the supremely danceable Mãe Carinhosa, Jon Luz with the sardonic Emigue Ingrote (“Juninha was young and fresh, you were going through the male menopause”), Nando da Cruz with Esperança (featuring Manu Dibango on the marimba) and Tchon de França.
This last song, a frenzied coladera recorded in 2005, describes the melancholy of a Cape Verdean who has settled in France and misses his “mar azul” (blue sea) - a key presence in many of Cesaria’s favorite songs. The diva also delighted in caustic lyrics, like the words of Quen Tem Ódio, where two carnival troops in 60s Mindelo settle their scores. It is as if we are listening to Cize wandering down memory lane when we hear her cover of Dos Palavras, a Mexican bolero from her younger days. She sang it in the bars of Mindelo, bringing tears to the eyes of Spanish-speaking sailors.
Cesaria chose all these songs. She loved them and sang them with great passion. Mãe Carinhosa reflects the singer’s character: strong, poignant, dense, rich, eclectic and loyal.
Fittingly, the album’s Cape Verdean Creole title means “Mother Affection”.
