Carmen Souza combines English sea shanties and Cape Verdean rhythms

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

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

“We have so many words that derive from British English,” Souza, a singer-songwriter and jazz instrumentalist, told the BBC.

“‘Salong’ means ‘so long’, ‘fulespide’ means ‘full speed’, ‘streioei’ means ‘straight away’, ‘bot’ means ‘boat’ and ‘ariope’ – which I always remember as my father would tell me when he wanted me to pick up my pace.

Ariope is now one of eight songs Souza composed for the album Port’Inglês – meaning English port – to explore the little-known history of the 120 years of 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 – and so I wondered if there was also a musical impact,” she says.

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

So rather than rearranging old recordings, Souza – and her musical partner Theo Pas’cal – created new music, inspired by the stories she encountered.

She combined jazz and English sea shanties with Cape Verdean rhythms – including funaná, played on an iron bar with a knife and accordion, and batuque, played by women and based on drum rhythms. Africans.

The Cape Verde Islands lie approximately 500 km (310 miles) off the coast of West Africa. They are mostly arid, with little arable land and prone to drought.

But they are a strategic midpoint in the Atlantic Ocean, and they were first controlled by the Portuguese as they traded between Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas – 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 merchants settled there and Cape Verde once again became a bustling crossroads.

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

They built roads, bridges, developed the natural harbors – known as Port’Inglês – and set up coaling stations, with coal imported from Wales.

The port of Mindelo, in São Vicente, became a vital refueling stop for steamships carrying goods across the Atlantic Ocean or to Africa – and an important global communications center with the arrival in 1875 of ‘an underwater cable station.

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

“As I began my research, I discovered many personal connections,” Souza says, including that his grandfather loaded coal onto ships in Mindelo.

This inspired her to write Ariope – the story of an older man urging a younger man, who prefers to stay in the shade playing his guitar, to “ariope”. The British ships are coming and the sailors don’t like to wait – “fulespide, streioei”, says the song.

Souza imagines his grandfather’s spirit in the song. He played the violin and was known as a great storyteller.

“I was told that if you were 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. She was born in Portugal and now lives in London. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), around 700,000 Cape Verdeans live abroad, twice as many as at home.

Historically, people were forced to move for work due to famine, drought, poverty and lack of opportunity.

This movement has contributed to the islands’ deep and rich tradition of very distinctive music, notably the melancholy 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 Cape Verde’s most influential morna writers, composers and singers.

According to Souza’s research, he also viewed the British presence as more beneficial than that of the Portuguese – at least for middle-class Cape Verdeans.

Souza’s song Amizadi, 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 war effort British.

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

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

Early written records of Cape Verdean music are rare – Portuguese settlers only documented Cape Verdean life and society with records of taxes and goods.

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

But Souza found an intriguing entry in the journal 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.

He describes an encounter with a group of about 20 young women who, Darwin writes, “were singing with great energy a wild song, clapping their legs with their hands.”

According to Souza, this is most likely an early performance of batuque – and she was inspired to write the song Sant Jago by Darwin’s accounts of the warm hospitality he received in Cape Verde.

Many young Cape Verdean musicians tend not to play the islands’ older rhythms, and some, like the contradança, are slowly disappearing.

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

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

Port’Inglês by Carmen Souza is released via Galileo MC