Cape town

Cape Verdean music broke through to the mainstream of "world music" fans last year with the release of Cesaria Évora (Nonesuch) and a tour that took the grand lady of Cape Verdean morna to Canada and the US. Cesaria is an unlikely candidate for star status -- a short and round, barefoot, 60-year-old woman with a sagging, bloodhound face, but she sings morna's soulfully mournful blues in a swooping, sultry sigh halfway between Sarah Vaughan's languor and Nina Simone's ache. Her three Parisian CDs, La diva aux pieds nus, Mar azul, and Miss perfumado, sold hundreds of thousands of copies during the early '90s all across Francophone Europe and in Quebec. On the 12-song Cesaria Évora , her powerfully tired alto triumphs over the emotional demon that, in "Nha cancera ka tem medida," she calls her "endless fatigue." And because she is based in Paris, where most Cape Verdean expatriates go in search of work, in songs like "Petit pays" and "Areia de Salamansa," Évora sings of endless homesickness with an unassuageable longing that links her to exiles everywhere.

Ramiro Mendes produced Évora 's Distino di belita and Mar azul and sang on Cesaria Évora , and he is proud of his association. Because of it he has been able to give up his day job and take a Cape Verdean band to Angola, touring Africa's largest Portuguese-speaking country. But today, in the Brockton basement studio, he and João Mendes want to talk about their new productions. These include Cape Verdean pop CDs like the brothers' own Palonkon and Gardénia Benros's Mix II. Less likely is Kambalocho -- guitar-based dances from Guinea Bissau sung by Tino Trimó. But as Ramiro explains, "Cape Verdeans feel close to Guinea Bissau, and we want to incorporate the two traditions. Cape Verde has always been open to music from all over West Africa. During the Angolan war of independence in the '70s, many Cape Verdeans were drafted into the Portuguese army and served there. They heard Angolan music and brought it back when they came home."

I'm thinking it must be the Angolan influence that makes the brothers' own Bandera and Diplomadu, an ensemble CD (both on MB Records), sound so unlike the traditionally Caribbean coladeira style that dominates standard Cape Verdean pop, but as Ramiro puts it, "Diplomadu is finaçon, a political music, the ancestor of calypso." As for Bandera, it is the first modern reformatting ever of bandera, a style as old as the 1460s, when the Portuguese first came to Cape Verde. "Bandera," Ramiro says, "is festival music played at Portuguese saints' festivals, so that unlike the more political forms like finaçon it wasn't banned by the Portuguese."

It's a 3/4 rhythm, full of call-and-response and the liquid melodies common to all West African dance music, and if in its choral harmonies I hear something akin to samba, that's because, says Ramiro, "it's cousin to Angolan semba, which the first slaves, who were taken by the Portuguese, brought to Brazil, where it became the samba."

Bandera and Diplomadu feel much more like world music than the singsongy, Carib-style cadence and compas music that rules Boston-area Cape Verdean radio, but perhaps that change mirrors the move of this generation of Cape Verdean descendants from Southeast Massachusetts, where they have been fishermen since the days of Melville, to Boston. Once less than 10,000 strong, today, says Ramiro, "there are over 100,000 of us in Boston. It's because of the closing of the fishing industry and the mechanization of the cranberry bogs. We've come to the city to work in factories."

All that means an outburst of Cape Verdean groceries, appliance stores, and travel agencies in and around Dorchester's Uphams Corner. At Fidalgo Travel on Dudley Street, owner José Fidalgo says that he "started selling CDs three years ago. The market is growing. We have it all." Indeed, his shop stocks music from all over the Portuguese-speaking world, Brazil included. But Fidalgo disagrees as to why the community is burgeoning. "It's our independence. Before 1975, when we won independence from Portugal, we were restricted to Portugal's quota. Now we have our own allotment as well as all those slots available to Cape Verdeans with family here. And there are lots of families here already." Keep your ears open for even more music from this vibrant, growing community.