Cesaria Evora - Nha Sentimento reviews
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| Popmatters |
 Cesária Évora’s story is reasonably familiar to world music fans by now. Hailing from the port city of Mindelo, on the Cape Verdean island of São Vicente, Évora began performing the islands’ distinctive musical styles, most notably the mournful morna and more upbeat coladeira, at a young age. Attaining wider recognition in her forties, she went on to have a successful career on the international world music circuit, becoming, for many, the voice of Cabo Verde and of the morna.
The familiarity of Évora’s work, which has received international dissemination since the mid-1980s via a number of releases on the Lusafrica label, has meant that new material is sometimes received as though it were largely unnecessary, as if the world music audience had got the point of morna and didn’t really need any more of this particular model. What this really highlights is an unfortunate tendency where world music releases are asked to fulfill different criteria than more mainstream rock and pop fare. True, the way in which difference and novelty are initially praised and then later criticized when they coalesce into perceived repetition is something that occurs regularly in rock and pop reception. But world music releases arguably have to mark their difference more explicitly given that they exist in less familiar musical styles and languages. A slight change in musical style or particular skill with lyrics might rescue Anglo-American music from criticisms of repetition; similar moves in unfamiliar languages are more likely to go unnoticed.
Perhaps the comparison to rock and pop is less useful than to jazz singing. Could anyone, for instance, seriously claim that the recorded output of Billie Holiday represents a repetitive body of work? Évora’s voice is most usefully compared to Holiday’s, not so much in terms of timbral similarity (there is something to this, but perhaps not enough) as in the way the singers individualize existing musical templates to often hypnotic effect. But also, as central as voices are to these two artists’ work, we should take into account the variance over time of arrangements, favored composers, and instrumental textures....full text |
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| Guardian |
| This new album raises one obvious question: can she still do it? The legendary Cape Verdean singer famed for her pained morna ballads, with their stories of romantic disappointment and melancholy, is now 68, and this is her first recording since an illness last year. Her previous release, Radio Midelo, consisted of her earliest recordings from four and a half decades ago, and she is clearly keen to follow that historic set with a reminder that her career is not over. Surprisingly, she doesn't concentrate on the style that made her famous: much of the album consists not of morna but Cape Verdean coladera dance songs, which use a faster treatment of the same rhythm but can still sound emotional. Zinha is a light but pensive song about adolescence, and the gently exquisite, violin-backed Noiva de Ceu mixes a sturdy melody with a hint of sadness. The three mornas, meanwhile, match her thoughtful vocals against delicate Egyptian string arrangements. The result is a breezy and easygoing set that lacks the intensity of her finest work, but shows Evora is still in fine voice....full text |
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| Telegraph |
| With who knows how many albums made in her 45-year career, famously melancholy Cape Verdean diva Cesária Évora sounds almost perky on this new offering. Concentrating on the uptempo coladera rhythm, the music gains an unusual, but interesting feel from the use of an Egyptian string section, and despite a stroke last year, the velvet-voiced Évora sounds in fine form....full text |
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