Sara Tavares at the White Stork Synagogue: afropop and Cape Verdean rhythms

Ethno Jazz Festival and Fiesta w Studio Marcina Kydryńskiego invite you to the White Stork Synagogue on 3 April for a concert by Sara Tavares, heir to the great Cesária Évora of Cape Verde.

Sara Tavares is a leading representative of a new generation of Cape Verdean singers who have gained worldwide recognition.

She was born outside the islands, among the children of emigrants who left Cape Verde in the Atlantic for Europe in search of work.

As a teenager, Sara Tavares founded Portugal’s first gospel choir in Lisbon and realised that music was her destiny. Her favourite artists at the time were Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway, while her other passion was football. In 1993–1994, she won a national television competition and took part in the Eurovision Song Contest. These events led to a contract with BMG and her first release, “Sara Tavares And Shout”.

Her 1999 solo debut, Mi Ma Bô, remained rooted in R&B, but Paris-based African producer Lokua Kanza combined it with rhythmic Afro-pop. It went Gold in Portugal and received a Best Performer nomination at the Portuguese Grammys, Globos de Oero. Balancê began Sara Tavares’s international career, a wonderful album swaying to rhythms of the islands and African diaspora.

Sara Tavares’s music is full of sunny spirit, and her latest album, Xinti (Feel It), positively bathes in it. Her work has never been so intense or emotional. This astonishing collection is full of surprises, revealing how much richer and broader her vocal repertoire has become. The songs are lyrical, sensual and intimate, yet clothed in positive funk rhythms from Cape Verde and Africa. Themes of love, both spiritual and interpersonal, surround philosophical reflections intended, in Tavares’s own words, to express “the ascending soul”.

“I give music free rein. I let it emerge from inside me and come to the surface; I don't plan any changes. Music grows within me, and I grow with it. Whatever the genre, I always value the same things in music: honesty and authenticity — everything that comes from within,” the artist says in an interview.

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