Carmen Souza combines English sea songs with Cape Verdean rhythms

When she was little and took too long getting ready for school, family gatherings or singing in the church choir, Cape Verdean musician Carmen Souza was often told to “ariope.”

What he didn’t realize until years later was that the Creole word came directly from the English word “hurry up.”

“We have a lot of words that derive from British English,” Souza, a singer-songwriter and jazz instrumentalist, tells the BBC.

“‘salong’ is ‘so long’, ‘fulespide’ is ‘full speed’, ‘streioei’ is ‘straight’, ‘bot’ is ‘boat’ and ‘ariope’, which I always remember my father saying to me when he wanted to speed up the pace.”

Ariope is now one of eight songs Souza has composed for the album Port’Inglês – meaning English port – to explore the little-known history of the 120-year British presence in Cape Verde. It started as research for his master’s degree.

“Cape Verdeans are very connected to music; in fact, we always say that music is our biggest export, so I was wondering if there was a musical impact as well,” he says.

There are very few recordings of compositions from the period: Souza discovered that an American ethnomusicologist, Helen Heffron Roberts, recorded some in the 1930s, but they are on very fragile wax cylinders and can only be heard in person at Yale University in the United States. Joined. .

So instead of rearranging old recordings, Souza (and his musical partner Theo Pas’cal) created new music, inspired by the stories he found.

She has combined jazz and English sea songs with Cape Verdean rhythms, including funaná, played on an iron bar with a knife and accordion, and batuque, performed by women and based on African drum rhythms.

The Cape Verde Islands are located about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off the coast of West Africa. They are mostly arid, with limited arable land and prone to drought.

But they are a strategic halfway point in the Atlantic Ocean, and were first controlled by the Portuguese when they traded between Southeast Asia, Europe and America: spices, silk and slaves. With the abolition of the slave trade, Cape Verde entered into decline.

Cape Verde remained a Portuguese colony until 1975, but during the 18th and 19th centuries, British traders settled in and Cape Verde once again became a bustling crossroads.

The British came in search of cheap labor: goats, donkeys, salt, turtles, amber and archil, a special ink used in making British clothing.

They built roads, bridges and developed natural harbours, which became known as Port’Inglês, and established coal loading stations, with coal brought from Wales.

São Vicente’s Mindelo port became a vital refueling stop for steamships transporting goods across the Atlantic Ocean or to Africa, and an important global communications center with the arrival in 1875 of a cable station. submarine.

Souza’s exploration of the British presence in Cape Verde quickly became personal.

“When I started researching, I found a lot of personal connections,” Souza says, including the fact that his grandfather loaded coal on ships in Mindelo.

That inspired her to write Ariope, the story of an older man who urges a younger man, who prefers to stay in the shadows playing his guitar, to “ariope.” The British ships are approaching and the sailors do not like to wait: “fulespide, streioei”, goes the song.

Souza imagines the spirit of his grandfather in the song. He used to play the violin and was known as a great storyteller.

“They told me that if you had to walk with him for miles, you wouldn’t notice the distance because it would be one funny story after another.”

Souza is part of the large Cape Verdean diaspora. He was born in Portugal and now lives in London. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there are around 700,000 Cape Verdeans living abroad, twice as many as at home.

Historically, people were forced to move in search of work due to hunger, drought, poverty and lack of opportunity.

This movement contributed to the islands’ rich and deep tradition of strongly distinctive music, including the melancholic morna made famous by singer Cesária Évora and declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2019.

The composer behind many of the songs that made Évora a global star was Francisco Beleza, also known as B Léza. He revolutionized morna and was one of the most influential writers, composers and morna singers in Cape Verde.

According to Souza’s research, he also considered the British presence to be more beneficial than the Portuguese, at least for middle-class Cape Verdeans.

Souza’s Amizadi song, a mix of funaná and jazz, was inspired by B Léza’s admiration for the British. He composed a morna – Hitler ca ta ganha guerra, ni nada, meaning “Hitler will not win the war” to show solidarity with the British people during World War II – and even raised money for the British war effort.

Souza discovered that the ports were “an important center for musicians” who came there to learn the music – and the instruments – from visiting foreign sailors.

They combined them with Cape Verdean rhythms to create new sounds. The mazurka, derived from a Polish musical form, and the contradance of the British quadrille.

Early written records of Cape Verdean music are scarce: Portuguese settlers did not document life and society in Cape Verde other than tax and commodity records.

They also banned batuque – for being too loud and too African – and funaná because its lyrics challenged social inequalities.

But Souza found an intriguing entry in the diary of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who arrived in Cape Verde in 1832, the first stop on his famous Beagle voyage to study the living world.

She describes an encounter with a group of about 20 young women who, Darwin writes, “sang with great energy a wild song, beating their legs with their hands.”

That, Souza says, is most likely one of the first performances of batuque, and to write the song Sant Jago was inspired by Darwin’s stories about the warm hospitality he received in Cape Verde.

Many younger Cape Verdean musicians tend not to play the older rhythms of the islands, and some, like the contradanza, are slowly disappearing.

Souza hopes that his album on Port’Inglês will inspire younger generations to believe that “there is a way to do something new with traditional genres.”

“I always contribute some different elements – improvisation, piano, flute, jazz harmonization – so that the music goes through another process of creolization.”

Port’Inglês by Carmen Souza premieres through Galileo MC