Cool Culture

I promised to report back about the Cape Verde Independence Concert at the French Institute. A few adjectives come to mind: festive, folksy, kinda funky. The house was packed. The evening was ideal for an outdoor concert. The day was remarkably not-humid. A breeze blew all day. The temperature stayed in the low 80s. It had been a beautiful day and was an even more beautiful evening. The house was packed and the crowd was in excellent spirits, assisted some by the bar that was serving bissap and booze concoctions.

I was so happy to be there because now I know Paul’s music. Now I know that he has pushed way beyond his Cape Verdean roots. He gets people out of their seats and up on the stage dancing. He’s charming. He’s friendly. He’s talented. He’s passionate. The other musicians liked playing with him as much as the audience liked listening to him and dancing to his music….especially the five women who got on stage and danced the batuko, which is a sexy ass-shaking, women’s dance that gets a lot of audience interaction. It's also known as a "forbidden dance," and when you've seen it, you understand why. [I tried to find a photo of the batuko...pages and pages and pages of images and none of them tell the story. I guess you had to be there.]

There’s a repetitive, simple, flat sound to most of the music I heard. It’s not so interesting. Don’t need to do it again.

Of the other five acts, only one created the kind of excitement that Paul elicited from the audience. It was a larger group of seven musicians with two sexy female vocalists. They were good. So were the 15 women who started the evening with a performance of tradition yela, which is a combination of vocalization with minimal harmony and drumming on calabashes.

It was a cool cultural outing, and what I liked most was Paul's music. Paul was completely there for the audience and they knew it. I also have to admit that I liked that the concert started Sat 9:05, five minutes late and it ended at 11, because everything at the French Institute ends at 11:00. In a culture where time is often unimportant, this was a real plus for me.