Cesária Évora

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Cesária Évora

Cesária Évora singing in San Diego, California
Background information
Born August 27, 1941 (1941-08-27) (age 68)
Mindelo, Cape Verde
Genres Morna
Coladeira
Occupations Singer
Years active 1957 – present
Labels Lusafrica

Cesária Évora (Portuguese pronunciation: [sɨˈzaɾiɐ ˈɛvuɾɐ]; born 27 August 1941) is a Cape Verdean popular singer. Nicknamed the "barefoot diva" for performing without shoes,[1] Évora is perhaps the best internationally-known practitioner of "morna."

Contents

[edit] Biography

The house of Cesária Évora

Cesária Évora – Cize to her friends – was born on the 27th August 1941 in Mindelo, Cape Verde. Her bright voice and physical charms were soon noticed, but her hope of a singing career remained unsatisfied. A Cape Verdean women’s group and the singer Bana both took her to Lisbon to cut a few tracks, but the recordings failed to catch the ear of a producer. In 1988, a young Frenchman of Cape Verdean extraction invited her to Paris to make a record. At 47, she had nothing to lose. Having never seen Paris, she agreed.

1988: Her first album is released: La Diva Aux Pieds Nus (The Barefoot Diva) produced by Lusafrica. The zouk-flavoured coladera “Bia Lulucha” is a hit with the Cape Verdean community. She gives a first concert in Paris to a small crowd at the New Morning on the 1st October.

1990: Distino di Belita, her second album, includes acoustic mornas and electric coladeras. Its release is very low-key and her label decides to try a different tack, recording a purely acoustic record.

1991: Évora is in France to record her first acoustic album. Accompanied by the Mindel Band, she performs at the Angoulême Festival on the 2nd June and at the Paris New Morning on the 7th. While the Paris concert only draws a small number of Cape Verdean fans, the concert in Angoulême attracts interest from the specialised press (a first article in the Libération daily newspaper). Her Mar Azul album is released at the end of October, word spreads and FM radio FIP play-lists the record. A new concert is organised for the 14th December at the New Morning. Her performance stuns the now mainly European audience in the packed theatre. Véronique Mortaigne writes in the Le Monde daily: “Cesária Évora, a lively fifty-year-old, sings morna with mischievous devotion... (she) belongs to the world nobility of bar singers”. The legend has begun to take shape.

1992: With Mar Azul, media excitement grows and radio stations such as France Inter play-list the track. Évora performs at the Nîmes Feria on the 7th June and Miss Perfumado is released in [[France] in October. The press compares Évora to Billie Holliday. Critics enthuse over the sweetness of her voice and provide many details that fuel her legend: Évora’s extravagant taste for cognac and tobacco, her hard life on Cape Verde’s forgotten islands, the warm nights of Mindelo... Concerts at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris on the 11th and 12th December are sold out a month in advance. Her first Brussels concert is at the Botanique (7th December).

1993: Miss Perfumado is a smash hit in France (more than 300,000 copies sold to date). Évora performs for the first time in Lisbon at the Teatro São Luis (25th May) and the police are forced to hold back a crowd of fans who cannot get into the hall. Two full houses at the Paris Olympia on the 12th and 13th June complete her triumph in France (the show is recorded and a “Live” album released on Parisian label Mélodie in 1996). She begins to tour the world: Barcelona (21st June), in Montreal in the Spectrum (14th July), Japan (end of October) and France (30 concerts at the end of 1993).

1994: Concerts in São Paulo (May). Caetano Veloso performs on stage with Évora and announces that she has a place among the great female singers who have inspired him. Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Africa, the West Indies... Évora is a stage phenomenon. Her Lusafrica label sign her to BMG and the record company releases a compilation entitled “Sodade, les plus belles Mornas de Cesaria” (Sodade, Cesaria’s finest mornas) in the autumn. Évora gives up drinking, but not smoking.

1995: The album Cesária (gold in France) is released in twenty countries including the USA (200,000 copies sold to date). The album is nominated for the Grammy Awards. Évora appears for 10 days at the Bataclan in Paris and goes on her first tour of North America. Madonna, David Byrne, Branford Marsalis and New York society flock to see her at the Bottom Line. Goran Bregovic asks her to record the song “Ausencia” for the original soundtrack of Emir Kusturica’s film “Underground”.

1996: A year of tours: France (40 concerts), Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, Germany (11 concerts), Hong Kong, Italy, Sweden, the USA and Canada (30 concerts), Senegal, the Ivory Coast and her first (sell-out) concert in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. She sings a duet with Caetano Veloso on the album “Red Hot + Rio”. The Arte TV channel devotes a documentary to her. Paulino Vieira (who co-produced the two albums “Miss Perfumado” and “Cesária” ) leaves the group and is replaced by the young, talented guitarist Rufino Almeida, known as Bau.

1997: Release of the album Cabo Verde. Concerts programmed at the Olympia in March and a world tour including her third tour of the USA. The album “Cabo Verde“ is also nominated for the Grammy Awards.

1998: Évora is on the road again accompanied by Jacinto Pereira (cavaquinho), José Paris (bass), Luis Ramos (guitars), Nando Andrade (piano), Totinho (saxophones and percussion) and Bau (guitars, cavaquinho, violin, band leader). From Greece to Japan, Israel to Portugal and the West Indies to Lebanon, Évora travels the world in 1998, but still finds time to record material for an album whose release is planned for April 1999. Before then, at the end of October, BMG releases the first “Best of Cesária Évora”, which includes all her fans’ favourite songs, as well as “Besame Mucho” (sung in Spanish), recorded the previous year for the original soundtrack of the film “Great Expectations”. In France, this “Best of” is certified gold three months later in January.

1999: The year 1999 begins with a Grammy nomination for the album Miss Perfumado (released in France in 1992, it only came out in the USA in 1998). The new album, entitled Café Atlantico, is released in France (300,000 copies to date), then worldwide in May. In March, Évora begins a world tour in Greece and again performs in North America in September and October. On stage, the band is enlarged to reflect the festive feel of the new repertoire: 12 musicians (including a violin section) are now led by pianist Nando Andrade. The tour ends in São Salvador, Brazil, just after a series of four concerts given at the Paris Olympia from the 7th to the 10th December. There, Évora receives several gold records presented by different BMG subsidiaries.

2000: Café Atlantico is nominated for the Grammy Awards and Évora wins a French Victoires de la Musique award in the “Best World Album” category, just before taking to the road again in April for her first major Latin American tour of Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. After Scandinavia in May, she sets out on another tour (of festivals) in the USA and Europe.

2001: São Vicente di Longe, Cesária Évora’s 8th studio album is recorded in Paris, La Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Nearly sixty musicians, arrangers and sound engineers work on the project in an environment that bears absolutely no resemblance to the conditions the singer recorded in at the start of her studio career. The album is as strikingly successful as “Café Atlantico”. It is also nominated for the Grammy Awards in the USA and the Victoires de la Musique in France. Évora is still on the road: 120 concerts in 2001 alone, including the Paris Zénith with around twenty Cape Verdean artists.

2002: A new major tour is planned that will take Évora to the five continents, with – for the first time – a series of concerts in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary), as well as Singapore, Tahiti and Nouméa. On the 20th June, BMG publishes an “Anthology”, compiling live audience favourites and a new version of “Sodade” sung in a duet with Bonga, the greatest vocal artist in Angolan music and one of Cesaria’s oldest friends.

2003: begins with 3 concerts in Hong-Kong (1, 2 and 3 March). This new world tour includes Spain, Romania, Mexico, among other countries, together with a huge North American tour, including 40 cities east to West. On June 17th, BMG releases “Club Sodade”, a project bringing together 10 of the Diva’s best songs, revisited by some of the most creative DJ’s of the house scene: Carl Craig, Kerri Chandler, Pepe Bradock, Señor Coconut, Francois K., and many others… This release is a prelude to Évora’s new studio album, entitled “Voz d’Amor”, published by BMG internationaly in September 2003, and highly acclaimed by the press worldwide.

2004: Voz d'Amor is awarded in the beginning of 2004, in the « Best World Music Album » category, by both a Grammy Awards (in the US) and a Victoires de la Musique (in France). The year 2004 is a very European year for Évora: she gives 82 concerts in 24 different European countries. Amongst them 5 sold out shows in Paris' Le Grand Rex. This series of concert is filmed for a DVD, that is released on the following October.

2005: Évora begins the year 2005 with a tour which brings her from the Baltic States to South Africa. Due to a surgical operation she has to interrupt the tour in May, just before several shows planned in the United States and Canada. Fortunately, this interruption is quite short. In September, Évora returns to the studios to record her new album, and goes back on a tour from Siberia (4 shows in October) to Brazil.

2006: Rogamar, Évora’s tenth album is released on March 6th. Fifteen tracks, including a duet with Ismaël Lô on “Africa Nossa”, make this album sound like a link between Africa, Europe and Brazil. Évora begins a new tour in North America (Mexico, U.S.A. and Canada) before playing in Paris at Le Grand Rex and at some of major European festivals.

2007: Évora begins her 2007 tour in Hungary with a show in Debrecen and two others in Budapest on April 6th, 7th and 8th before performing in Russia in Saint Petersburg, Moscow and Yekaterinburg in front of a won over audience. Her success in the former eastern block does not decrease but unfortunately that series of concerts is put to an end and her tour in the US scheduled for June and July cancelled. The doctors have diagnosed a coronary problem and decide to have Évora operated. She only hits the road again at the end of the year with a series of shows in Russia.

2008: The new tour starts in Australia. But suffering from a stroke after her Melbourne concert, Évora is admitted at the hospital and is repatriated to Paris for further examination. The tour is cancelled and Évora is obligated to rest for several months. Lusafrica takes advantage of that quiet period to release the recordings Évora had done for various local radio stations of Mindelo when she was in her twenties back in the early 1960s. Released in November, the “Radio Mindelo” album comes with a richly illustrated book with pictures and documents of the time. These 22 tracks, mostly exclusive, delight the fans, helping them wait for a new studio album.

2009: Évora is doing much better and gets back onstage but she needs to take it easy so her public appearances become less frequent than in the past. Her new album Nha Sentimento is scheduled for October 26th. Recorded between February and May 2009 in Mindelo and Paris, it includes 14 tracks mainly written by her two fetish authors Manuel de Novas and Teofilo Chantre.

[edit] Discography

[edit] Studio albums

[edit] Compilations & live albums

  • Sodade - Les Plus Belles Mornas de Cesária (Best of compilation, 1994)
  • Club Sodade (Remix album, 1996)

CESARIA EVORA – CLUB SODADE – released in June 2003 (Lusafrica) With several million albums sold throughout the world, two Victoire de la Musique award and one Grammy Award ®, the Cape Verdean diva's influence now reaches well beyond the sphere of World Music. Cesaria Evora moves listeners with her grace and simplicity, her ability to reach their inner world and the inspiration she encourages. In fact, inspiration is probably the right word to describe the feelings of house artists fascinated by the Barefoot Diva's music. For Carl Craig, Osunlade, Kerri Chandler and Pépé Bradock, apart from the hedonism of the house (club) scene, Cesaria Evora's music undoubtedly suggests its inseparable melancholy (sodade). Brilliantly orchestrated by Gilb'R (producer / DJ / seminal courier of the French electronic scene), “Club Sodade” invites the cream of contemporary house producers to a choice banquet where the menu consists of covers of the Cape Verdean diva's now classic songs, more or less true to the originals. Apart from its pleasantly surprising aspect, the album represents the successful collision of two worlds, two ways of looking at music and fun. The sad languor of Cesaria's singing and her unique voice are confronted by productions whose identities spring from soul and disco. The combination should help to broaden our auditory tastes. To put it more simply, Club Sodade is the soundtrack for a summer we hope will last forever.


THE CAST

Château flight (remixed track: Petit Pays from the album Cesaria , 1995) Behind the pseudonym “Château flight” stand Gilb'R, the brains of the Versatile label, and I:Cube, a French producer whose youth is rivalled only by the respect he enjoys on the international electronic scene. I:Cube has made two albums for Versatile and Château flight released a first album, Puzzle, to universal acclaim last year. Since then, the duo has produced one remix after another: Brandy, Seiji, AtJazz, Bebel Giberto, Serge Gainsbourg…

Carl Craig (remixed track: Angola from the album Miss Perfumado, 1992) While Kerri Chandler is a star of New York house, Carl Craig is a legend of the more melancholic Detroit house. Directly influenced by jazz, Carl Craig's music moves from house to techno to hybrid jazz, defying any attempt to label it. Carl Craig proved his affection for jazz with the Innerzone Orchestra project on Talkin' Loud a few years ago and released the especially memorable albums More songs about food and revolutionary art on SSR in 1997 and Landcruising in the early 90s. In tribute to Cesaria, our man has returned to his first love, the dance floor.

Kerri Chandler (remixed track: Nutridinha from the album Sâo Vicente di longe, 2001 & Nho Antone Escaderode from the album Café Atlantico, 1999). What can you say about Kerri Chandler, except that this musician from New Jersey is one of the ten most important house producers in the world? Along with Moodymann, Ron Trent and Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler has helped to turn house music into the soul of the 3rd millennium. Apart from the countless house, deep and garage maxis that the man has produced, he has also released two superb and particularly memorable albums: Saturday with Jérôme Seydenham on Ibadan and Kaoz on King St. on King Street.

Señor Coconut (remixed track: Besame Mucho from Best Of Cesaria Evora, 1998 ). German producer Uwe Schmidt launches projects and adopts aliases at the speed of light: Atom Heart, Erik Satin for lounge, Geez'n'Gosh for minimal house on Force Inc, Flanger with Burnt Friedmann on NTone and many others. Two years ago, Uwe Schmidt remixed Kraftwerk in Latin style under the name of Señor Coconut. The Latin lover in exile in Santiago, Chile, could not resist the idea of a remix for the great Cesaria.

Osunlade (remixed track: Bondade e Maldade from the album Sâo Vicente di longe, 2001) A highly respected American producer, founder of the Yoruba Records label, Osunlade embodies contemporary black music, releasing house underground maxis while producing million-selling soul records (Musiq Soulchild). His first album, Paradigm, was released last year on English label Soul Jazz, signing its first contemporary artist. Onsulade has also made remixes for Spacek, Zero 7, John Cutler and Incognito.

DJ Rork & Demon Ritchie (remixed track: Sodade from the album Miss Perfumado, 1992) Rork is one of the first Parisian DJs to play house in its most “soul”, hedonistic dimension. After years spent at the decks, Rork founded the Soldiers of Twilight, a project he worked on at the now legendary Batofar “afters”. It is certainly because Rork always focuses on the organic aspect of his music that he works with saxophonist Demon Ritchie, a Stakhanovite of live improvisation.

Cris Prolific (remixed track: Negue from the album Sâo Vicente di longe, 2001) Not widely known to the general public despite a few remixes for American stars such as The Roots, Cris Prolific should soon make a name for himself. The producer from the French hip-hop scene is working with Jayhem (Kojak) on an album with Creole influences under the alias Kemit Sources for Versatile.

4 Hero (remixed track: Miss Perfumado from the album Miss Perfumado, 1992). Pioneers of the Jungle / Drum'n'bass genre, Dego and Marc Mac have endless aliases (Tek 9, Jacob's Optical Stairway, Nu-Era) and have constantly broadened their field of investigation. The album Two Pages, released on Talkin Loud, forcefully proclaimed 4 Hero's affection for jazz and soul, a passion they continue to express in their work with the London broken beat / nujazz scene (Seiji, Atjazz, Alex Attias). Dego is also the founder of the 2000 Black label.

Pépé Bradock (remixed track: Angola from the album Miss Perfumado, 1992) This is the French producer that everyone is talking about... Even with just a few maxis (Kif, Versatile) and remixes (Cassius, Iz & Diz, Blaze) noticed by the cream of house producers worldwide, the Pépé Bradock hype is justified. Monsieur Bradock produces efficient but far-from-sanitised house for the dance floor, while addressing the senses with highly memorable sounds. Pépé Bradock now releases his productions - including his recently-released first album - on his own label, Atavisme. Apart from his club mix of “Angola”, this golden boy has come up with a dub version as smoky as the cigarettes the Barefoot Diva particularly enjoys.

François K (remixed track: Sangue de Beirona from the album Cabo Verde, 1997). This French native of Rodez is a legend of American dance music. Kraftwerk remixer, Depeche Mode producer, founder of the Wave label and New York's famous Body and Soul nights along with Joe Claussel, more than anyone, François Kervorkian embodies the soul / disco / house relationship. This remix was already released back in 1997 and was the first major success of what might be called “world-mix”. The track now enjoys cult status and has been compiled many times. The remix has been hard to find and makes a great ending for this project.


  • Live à l'Olympia (Live album, recorded at the Paris Olympia, 1996)
  • Colors of the World (Allegro Music, 1997)
  • Best Of' (Best of compilation, 1998)
  • Anthology (Best of compilation, 2002)
  • Anthologie - Mornas & Coladeras (Double CD edition of Anthology, 2004)
  • Live d'Amor (Live DVD, recorded in 2004 at Le Grand Rex, Paris, 2004)

[edit] References

  1. ^ globeandmail.com: Print Edition

[edit] External links

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