When Portuguese sailors pushed down the coast of West Africa fifty years before Columbus, they set into motion not only the Age of Discovery but also the whole African and European cultural mix, what we now call "Creole" culture. Yet the music of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Africa, with centuries of history behind it and with close connections to the Americas, is the last major African pop style to emerge on the world music scene.

The reason for this is partly political. After independence was declared in 1975, Angola was wracked by a civil war that killed a half million people and destroyed the country's infrastructure. Music production all but ceased; it is estimated that only about fifty records were produced in Angola in the last twenty years.

Logistics also play a part. Most of the African music popular in the U.S. has come via the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. But unless you've spent time in Lisbon or in the Portuguese-speaking enclaves of New England and New Jersey, you probably haven't heard much of the music in this collection.

The moment you hear this music it sounds so familiar - so Caribbean, or suggesting Brazil or Cuba. Indeed, the Portuguese colonies in Africa (islands of Cape Verde, Príncipe and São Tomé, and on the mainland Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique) were all deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Angola, in particular, has been called the black mother of the Americas. And Cape Verde, settled by Europeans and Africans at the same time, could be considered the world's first "Creole" society.

The encounter between Africa and Europe that created "Creole" culture centuries ago took place not only in Africa itself, but in Lisbon as well. This city, with the oldest black population in Europe, has emerged as a major center of African music production. The current of Afro-Portuguese music links three continents in a mighty circuit of Creolizing rhythms that have come to dominate the world music scene.

Cape Verde

The nine islands that make up Cape Verde are strung strategically between the north and south Atlantic and between the three continents of Europe, Africa and South America. Uninhabited when first discovered around 1460, Cape Verde was used by the Portuguese for re-supplying ships that serviced their far-flung empire and as a way station in the slave trade.

Historically, the audience for Cape Verdean music has stayed within the islands and their overseas enclaves where two out of three Cape Verdeans live. But this is changing. Fifty-four-year-old singer Césaria Évora's popularity in France has put Cape Verdean culture in the spotlight and taken its music to the world stage.

The morna is the oldest Creole style. The modern morna was developed in the 1930s, on the island of São Vicente. In the port of Mindelo, the compositions of B. Leza (Francisco Xavier da Cruz) gave the morna a form that lasted for decades. Mindelo is also the home town of Cesaria Evora, a niece of B. Leza. She returned the morna to its acoustic roots and launched it onto the world stage. "Sodade" may be the most famous morna of all. Its theme is emigration, a basic fact of life in the islands.

The coladeira is a morna in high gear with influences from Brazilian samba, Latin cumbia and French Caribbean zouk. Its name comes from thc word cola - "glue" in Portuguese - because the couples dancing it look like they are stuck together. Coladeira went electric in the late sixies but Cesaria's "Bia Lulucha" features a very Creole clarinet amidst a '70s style rhythm section. "Rosinha," played by the Netherlands-based group Livity, is a modernized coladeira heavily influenced by French Caribbean pop. It rules Cape Verdean dance floors from Rhode Island to Praia.

Funaná hails from the island of Santiago, which was the center of the Cape Verdean slave trade. Under the colonial regime, funaná was only heard in the countryside and disparaged as "folklore" by the urban middle clss. Thc funaná was especially unpopular with the Portuguese colonial powers for its obliquely political lyrics. In the 1980s, plugged-in funaná became one of the most popular Cape Verdean styles.

Two cuts of amplified funaná are presented here: "Luis di Kandinha" (Kandinha's Son) by Pedro Ramos, and "Vizinha Ka Bale" (My Neighbor's No Good) by his girlfriend, Jacinta Sanches. Both singers hail from Santiago and sing in the 'deep" kriolu of the island, the dialect farthest from standard Portuguese. The lyrics include proverbs drawn from the oral tradltions of Santiago.

"Amor Divino," with its trumpet shakes and Spanish lyrics, represents yet another thread in Cape Verdean music. The late '60s and early '70s saw the arrival of electric instruments and Latin American influences, including cumbias and other rhythms from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. "Amor Divino" also features two of the leading figures in Cape Verdean music, Bana and Paulino Viera .

Also on São Vicente, Bana was a student of morna composer B. Leza, who taught him to sing. After emigrating to Senegal, Bana went to Rotterdam, Holland, which was, until the '70s, the recording center for Cape Verdean music. In the '60s, a string of hits in Rotterdam made Bana famous back in the islands. Now living in Lisbon, he is revered as a founder of Cape Verdean pop and he makes frequent appearances in the Cape Verdean enclaves. Paulino Vieira, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, has arranged and recorded with many Cape Vedean stars, and has produced some of Cesaria's biggest hits.

You might think that the merengue-flavored "Tulipa Nera," by the Lisbon-based Cape Verdean band of the same name, also came to Cape Verde from the Caribbean. But its pathway is more complicated than that. It came to the islands from Angola, where the merengue seems to have taken hold more strongly than anywhere else in Africa. Tulipa Negra's style comes partly from Angolan guitar bands of the early '70s, when merengue influences were very strong.

Dany Silva is a Lisbon-based singer, bassist and producer strongly influenced by blues and rock, elements well-integrated into Cape Verden music. "Mamã Africa" has a contemporary musical setting, but the message of its lyrics is as old as Cape Verde itself.

São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe are islands in the Gulf of Guinea off the Central African coast, almost directly on the equator. Like Cape Verde, they were way stations in the slave trade, but they were lush and developed into plantation islands, devoted principally to cocoa. Many Cape Verdeans migrated there to work during times of drought. The best-known guitar band from Sao Tomé is África Negra. Heavily influenced by nearby Congo music, "Bô Legá Caçô Modê Bô" (You Let The Dog Bite You) is a juke-joint style tune that sounds like it could go on for hours. It is sung in forro, the Creole language of São Tomé.

Angola

Thc father of contemporary Angolan popular music is Carlos "Liceu" Vieira Dias, who played the Angolan acoustic guitar, known as the viola, and introduced the ensemble of violas, dikanza (scraper) and ngomas (Angola conga drums) still heard today. Starting in the '5Os, this urban popular music contained disguised political messages and the stirrings of nationalistic feelings. Dias ended up a political prisoner of the Portuguese for many years. His legacy lives on - he is the uncle of André Mingas, heard in this collection singing Dias' composition "N'Zambi."

Since the '70s, the Angolan ambassador to the Afropop worId has been Bonga (Barceló de Carvalho), who was born in Kipiri, a small town north of Luanda. His musical career began with his founding of the group Kissueia in the ealy '60s, a period when Angolan folk music was gaining enormous popularity among the country's students. Kissueia addressed Angola's social problems, including the grinding poverty of the urban shantytowns. A champion athlete, Bonga was sent to Lisbon by the Angolan colonial administration. In Portugal, Bonga's soccer career continued alongside his music.

In 1972, Bonga left Lisbon to protest the colonial war in Angola, and settled temporarily among the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, Holland. There he learned kriolu, a language he often sings in, and began his lasting connection to the Cape Verdean communities.

"Mona Ki Ngi Xica," sung in Kimbundu, comes from Bonga's first album, released in 1972. The record's subversive lyrics earned a warrant for Bonga's arrest, and he traveled back and forth continually between Belgium, Germany and France until Angola's independcnce was declared in 1975. He now lives and records in Portugal and his repertoire embraces all of Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Waldemar Bastos is a rising star of Angolan music. Born in the nothern Angolan city of M'Banza Congo, he was raised in the regions of Huambo, Cabinda and Luanda, all of which have served as sources for the rhythms and themes of his songs. In 1986, Bastos recorded his first LP in Brazil, with guest singers Chico Buarque, Martinho da Vila and João do Vale. It is a seamless blend of Brazilian and Angolan music, of samba and semba.

Recently, he has been developing and refining his acoustic guitar style, which can be heard in "N Gana." The title is the name of an old lady, a grandmotherly presence, who watches over Luanda's Caputo neighborhood, on the boundary between city and suburb. As in many Angolan songs, thc melody seems to float above the interlocking guitar parts and percussion.

André Mingas of Luanda was part of the cultural exchange between Angola and Brazil in the early '80s. His arrangement of "N' Zambi" bears strong traces of Cuban popular music, epecially in the opening trumpet solo. Since the '50's, Cuban music has been a catalyst in the emergence of modern African dance music, especially in Zaire, Angola's neighbor, where rumba was an important ingredient in soukous.

Cuban influences in Angola didn't come merely from imported records and touring bands. There were thousands of Cuban troops on the ground, called in by the Marxist MPLA movement to fight on their side. Jam sessions between Cuban troops on rumba drums and Angolans playing ngomas brought Creole culture back home.

Like other African pop, Angolan music continues to absorb and assimilate outside influences, especially French Caribbean zouk and rock. Vum-Vum, who lives in Germany, is one of the new generation of Angolan singers. "Salale," translated as "White Ant," is based on Angolan folklore: an insect that comes out after a heavy rainfall, flies briefly, and then falls back to earth.

                      - Morton Marks

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Adventures in AFROPEA 3: Afro-Portugal
Telling Stories to the Sea

Compiled by David Byrne and Yale Evelev

Luaka Bop, Inc.
Manufactured and distributed by Warner Bros. Records, Inc.
WB 9 45669-2

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