EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 24 - Cape Verdean Music

Genre of the Day - Cape Verdean Music 🇨🇻

Album of the Day - Manga by Mayra Andrade (2019)

Today’s genre is so uncannily similar in background to yesterday’s that, as usual, I take this randomized genre of the day bestowed upon me as some sort of astrological sign. Synchronicity, to me, is generally a good omen, so I pass on some of those tidings to you. Like yesterday’s Cayman Islands, Cape Verde lies in the middle of its own cultural triangle—or line, really—between Portugal and Brazil and was uninhabited until the European ‘Age of Discovery.’ That epoch was spearheaded by the Portuguese, who swiftly snapped up the island archipelago as Europe’s first headways into the tropics. Over that relatively short time frame of five hundred years, Cape Verde has become a rich center of musical vibrancy at the center of the silent Atlantic sea.

As the epicenter of worlds between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Cape Verde was also an early hub of the sordid Atlantic slave trade. Traders transported thousands of west African people to the islands; some of them stayed, but natural industry and agriculture on the archipelago has historically been scarce, so most of its economic activity for centuries was predicated on the slave trade. Even decades past the conclusion of the slave trade, a different yet still vicious strain of displacement affected Cape Verdeans as thousands were persuaded to move to other corners of the Portuguese Empire—which, astoundingly, persisted in massive colonial holdings until the 1970s—bringing their culture with them. Today, more people of Cape Verdean heritage live outside of the archipelago than within.

Cesária Evora, the queen of morna.

Even despite that immense outflow, Cape Verde gained independence in 1975 and has staked its claim as a distinctive culture—Cape Verdean Creole, the world’s oldest living communication system dubbed a creole, has become elevated to written form and is the lyrical carrier of the islands’ music. The islands’ music is as rhythmically inclined and widely spread in structure as its scattered landmasses. Its oldest tradition is the now-antique batuque, incorporating complex continental polyrhythms that gradually build to a climax known as the txabéta as the rhythms meet. Its most defining and beloved musical expression, though, is morna. Morna’s origins are opaque, characteristic of a country defined by the displacement of people and abrupt end to stories, but it’s commonly traced back to the landú rhythm. One thing about any Portuguese-derived music tradition, it will incorporate a strange and unique guitar, and morna employs the violão, similar to a classic Portuguese guitar, and the cavaquinho, the forebearer of the ukelele that is also employed in Indonesia. These instruments soundtrack morna’s typically dramatic and forlorn tales. Funaná is a lighter analog relishing more in down-to-earth, quotidian yet poetically expressed vignettes, driving its rhythms with the accordion and metallic scraping percussion.

Mayra Andrade’s reading of the Portuguese-language and African pop landscape in the context of her country’s traditional sounds is stunning and deft, pouring these distillations into a veritable musical grab-bag on 2019’s Manga. Unless the most striking dejà vú ever came upon me, I swear I'd heard opener “Afecto”—I expected it to be some sort of massive hit I’d heard in the ether, but it’s not even among her most streamed tunes. However I crossed paths with its arresting groove before, I’m glad I did again—the country’s guitar traditions shine, beginning with quiet, soft, almost aquatic licks that gradually clarify and intensify as the song progresses, the percussion becoming increasingly incisive. A balanced blend of organic and electronic elements makes good on the album’s promise to bring morna (“Plena”), funana, zouk, and Afrobeats together, yielding satisfying contrasts like the electronic vocoder solo closing “Limitason” going into the piano gently swirling through “Segredu” The harder, autotuned edge of “Pull Up” stakes Cape Verde’s place in the Portuguese pop sphere, but songs like “Vapor di Imigrason” and the raucous “Festa San Santiago,” which makes reference to the aforementioned txabéta rhythm in her native tongue lays bare the passion in her voice for her home and its cultural resilience.