[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and this is Kavita Shah.

[MUSIC - Kavita Shah: Sodade]

The song you just heard is titled Sodade. It's from vocalist and composer, Kavita Shah's latest album, Cape Verdean Blues. Released just last month, the album features 12 tracks and is described as a carefully curated love letter to Cape Verdean singer, Cesaria Evora. Did I say that right?

Kavita Shah: Yes. Cesaria.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Breathtaking archipelago. She passed in 2011 at age 70. Évora originally recorded Sodade on her 1992 album, Miss Perfumado. The song touches on feelings of love, longing, and the idea of home, something that Shah connected with. Let's take a listen to the original.

[MUSIC - Cesaria Evora: Sodade]

Alison Stewart: Kavita Shah visited Cape Verde for the first time, spending a month in the town where Evora once lived in and experienced and inspired her latest album which featured traditional Cape Verdean sounds as well as original composition filled with jazz influences and vocal improvisations. The album is called Cape Verdean Blues, it is out now. New York's own Kavita Shah joins us in studio to discuss, and if the name sounds familiar, yes, she did recently perform on New Sounds Live last month. Welcome to the studio.

Kavita Shah: Thank You for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: When was the first time you heard Cesaria Evora sing?

Kavita Shah: I was in college. I was around 19 years old, and I discovered her recording. I was obsessed with Brazilian music at the time, I was learning Portuguese, and this was just something different. This kind of hit me. A few months later, I was actually living abroad in Brazil, in Salvador, the Bahia. When I was there, I had the chance to see her perform live.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Kavita Shah: I was 20 years old and it completely changed my life. She had this way about her that was so authentic, so herself. She would drink on stage and have her whiskey and be barefoot and smoke cigarettes, and just was not entertaining. Her power was not about overly performing to others. Her power was bringing people to her and to her authenticity, and to see her do that, and especially as a woman of color, as a Black woman was very, very powerful, and it made me feel like there's something there that I need to know, I need to discover.

Alison Stewart: When you went to visit where she lived, would you describe it for us?

Kavita Shah: [chuckles] How much time do we have? It's such a special place, the island of Sao Vicente. It's like a home for me. It's a place where the minute I got there, I decided to turn my phone off and just discover it with my five senses and have this immersive experience there where things led me. One thing led me to the other. Before I even knew where I was staying, I turned out to be staying a few houses down from Cesaria's house, from where she lived and where at the time, her granddaughter was still living.

Very soon after that-- I mean, what is it like? I mean, I remember kissing the ground, the beach. There's just something-- It's magical. It's like this oasis in the middle of the Atlantic. It's very different from West Africa. There's some things that are similar to it. It feels, in some way, you have these beautiful colonial houses. You have this port, you have these beaches, these mountains, this dry arid moon kind of landscape and music.

Very soon after arriving, I had the great fortune to meet, again, by serendipitous series of events, like taking a bus ride to the cemetery, finding the luthier that lived behind the cemetery, the luthier guiding me to this person. I ended up in the house of Bao, who was Cesaria's musical director and who was the acclaimed leading acoustic guitar player of Cape Verde. That was really my first interaction with music in Cape Verde, and that slowly over time, again, in a very unforced not New York way of [chuckles] life, led to this album, Cape Verdean Blues.

Alison Stewart: She was known for singing-- Is it morna?

Kavita Shah: Yes.

Alison Stewart: This is how you pronounce it?

Kavita Shah: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's the history behind morna? What are some of the themes?

Kavita Shah: Morna is a ballad form that speaks usually about love or longing or sodade, this word sodade, which describes a type of nostalgia. The way I like to say is it's a nostalgia for something that doesn't exist anymore, like a place that doesn't exist. That's something I resonate with as a child of Indian immigrants because this feeling of sodade was permanent in my household.

It's this place and this past that no matter what, you can't turn back the clock. You can't physically depart. You can't find it anymore. Cape Verde is an island nation. The history of Cape Verde is this place of what I would say in Portuguese, ida y vuelta, going and coming. Today, there's a large diaspora of Cape Verdeans than there are a population living in Cape Verde.

When you translate that kind of feeling to the music and to the morna in particular, there's this idea of people leaving, people leaving to migrate, people leaving to go on ships. A lot of Cape Verdeans went to Norway or to Rhode Island in the 1800s as whalers. There's this long history of people leaving by sea. The song Sodade itself was a despedida a farewell song for someone leaving to the island of Sao Tome, another former Portuguese colony further south in Africa, very far away from Cape Verde, probably never to come back home.

That feeling of you don't know when people are coming back, you don't know when something's coming back, there's this impermanence that I would say characterizes the national consciousness, and that finds itself in the morna. Historically, of course, there's similarities to the fado. There's some similarities to that kind of-- I mean, blues really, right, like this longing. I'd say that the one thing Bao says that you need to sing the morna is feeling. That's the one characteristic of morna.

It's not the specific, yes, we can say the specific guitar pattern, but it's really the feeling. In that way, it's like the blues.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Kavita Shah, the name of the album is Cape Verdean Blues. Let's take a listen to another song from the album. It's a listening party after all, this is Joia. What does joia mean in English?

Kavita Shah: Joia means gem or jewel.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Kavita Shah: Joia]

Alison Stewart: Kavita, tell us about some of the instrumentation we just heard.

Kavita Shah: You're hearing Bao on the guitar and also on the ukulele. I actually made him discover the ukulele because I carry that around when I travel sometimes, and he really loved it. He's a luthier by training, and his father was a famous luthier in Cape Verde. Now on the tour, he's bringing a ukulele that he tuned in his own way. I can't even play his ukulele. You hear ukulele, you hear guitars.

All of the guitar layers are played by Bao, and then you also hear the percussion of the wonderful Miroca Paris, who is also a touring member of Cesaria Evora's band. He's using all kinds of instruments from different parts of Africa, including my favorite, which is the calabaza on this. Calabaza is like a pumpkin or like a gourd that he's hitting. That's the kind of bass sound you're hearing.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's a really interesting percussive sound.

Kavita Shah: Yes. I love it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kavita Shah. We're discussing her album,Cape Verdean Blues. We'll have more with Kavita after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It On WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Joining me in studio is Kavita Shah. The name of her album is Cape Verdean Blues. We're having a listening party. At the top of the segment, I mentioned you are from New York, you grew up here. How did growing up here influence the music you make?

Kavita Shah: Oh, my music is completely a product of New York. You know what I remember, Alison? I called in to WNYC when I was like eight or nine. I think it was New York Kids or something. I sang Amazing Grace on the phone, on my phone with the chord. New York's everything for me. I had the culture of my parents from India, but they also had the '70s New York culture of all kinds of music.

My grandparents lived here as well so they had the The Great American Songbook and Frank Sinatra. My grandfather came here in the '40s. Jazz was very alive then. I grew up singing in the Young People's Chorus of New York City where we did every kind of music under the sun. Not only would we do it, but there was someone in the choir that reflected that diversity. If we did a Norwegian song, someone's mom would come and give us the perfect Norwegian accent, or we'd go sing in churches in Harlem, sing gospel music.

We had the legitimacy because we had people in that community represented in the choir. That gave me this value of all types of music being on the same playing field and also, all music from different cultures having value. I think that gave me also like an entryway into many different cultures through music. Often, how I've learned languages has been one and the same with learning music from a particular culture. That's a big part of the-- I don't like the word fusion, because I think it's so overused. I think, let's say, blending together of different elements, bringing things together, I think that's me, that's New York.

That's present in all of my projects. Even in this project, which is traditional Cape Verdean music, I'm doing jazz improvisation. I'm bringing in different cultural elements. We do a Brazilian song. We do an Indian song. I can't help but bring different things together. That's who I am.

Alison Stewart: Maybe it's the union of them rather than the fusion.

Kavita Shah: Yes. I think that's a good word.

Alison Stewart: With united together. Anybody who's been listening to this for the last 20 minutes will probably not be surprised by this. You're also a researcher. [laughs] Not as well as me, a composer and a vocalist, and you speak multiple languages. How many?

Kavita Shah: Yes. Nine.

Alison Stewart: Okay. What are the nine?

Kavita Shah: Spanish, obviously English, Portuguese, French, Cape Verdean, Creole, Italian, Gujarati, Hindi, and I've studied Yoruba.

Alison Stewart: That's very impressive. Are you one of those people who can pick up languages? There are some people who it's their-- Yes.

Kavita Shah: I am. I'm lucky to have that talent. It's also lyrics of songs. I remember, if I sing a song once 20 years ago, I remember all the lyrics. There's something with oral retention. I think it has to do something also with empathy, I would say, or this is something I'm putting together. There's something of a feeling with that sonority. I think that's what helps me enter a music like Cape Verdean music or another form of music because you're getting to that heart of emotion or able to connect with those musicians from that place that's like the front and center.

Alison Stewart: Give us an example of a research trip you made.

Kavita Shah: Well, Cape Verde. I went the first time in 2016. I went back in 2018 with a grant from the Jerome Foundation. The first time was really discovery and the second time was really I am interviewing as many musicians as I can. I'm meeting as many musicians as I can. I'm speaking to ethnomusicologists. I'm playing with the guy who maybe has had one too many grogues drinks at the local bar. I'm also playing music with him. It's just this immersive experience, which I also have done in Brazil.

I lived in Salvador de Bahia. I did research on Afro-Brazilian music with a group called Male Debalê which is a Bloco Afro. Male Debale does socio-educative work in this local poor Black community. They have an elementary school on campus where they control the narrative of Black consciousness to this local population that is very marginalized, especially racially marginalized. They're having themes in Carnival about South Africa or African liberation or American liberation movements or Black slave uprisings in Brazil as a way to grow consciousness, instill pride in people, and share community through music.

That's where I decided to become a musician because I saw all these threads come together and I saw that kind of meaning come together. I thought I want to make my life with all these intersections.

Alison Stewart: What does immersing yourself, how do you know it's helping you achieve your creative goals?

Kavita Shah: Oh, I think I get so much inspiration. I think that's the biggest thing. I think that New Yorker part of me that's overly perfectionist and overly efficient and trying to do everything, I think my intuitive side takes over. As an artist, that's very important for me to tap into. Also, music is this universal language. Yes, I have these gifts that permit me this wonderful cross-cultural experience, but I think any musician, to some degree, could meet any other musician and have some way to jam or some way to get together and make music.

I think that's a really beautiful thing that's universal that we have as musicians. Immersion is a way to, I guess really, really understand something as deeply as I can. Obviously, it's not my culture so there's a limit to how far I can go, but understand something as deeply as I can. Also, I think it's what you were just saying in the break about languages. It's like you only get so far at a computer, on a phone, on your own. Immersion's about being with people.

I would say it's the same for me with my approach to jazz. I learned jazz in a bunch of clubs in Harlem, like the Lenox Lounge. It's about understanding community, seeing how music lives with community, with people looking at people's eyes, understanding body languages, understanding nuances. That song, Sodade, one of the things I love in Cape Verde is it's not just Cesaria's song. Out in the world, everybody knows it as Cesaria's most famous song. In Cape Verde, people sing it differently.

There's one guy that would sing at the bar, the local bar, and he had a different way of pronouncing words. He used some different words, actually. That totally changed the way that I understood the song. It's those little cues that you see and that you pick up. With a word in Portuguese, convivencias, to live with each other or to live with, living with them and living alongside these things, they become real. They become much more meaningful. They become much more deep.

There's no way I could have recorded this album somewhere else. I recorded the vocals in Mindelo. It's everything for me, immersion.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kavita Shah. The name of the album is Cape Verdean Blues. I wanted to actually play the title track if we have it. I think they're going to pull it up. What did you name your album after? Let's start there.

Kavita Shah: Horace Silver, great bebop jazz pianist from the United States. He was of Cape Verdean origin. For me, as a jazz musician engaging with music from Cape Verde, it felt only natural to somehow call in Horace's legacy. The title itself, Cape Verdean Blues, seemed to describe also this feeling of morna, this feeling of sodade, which was my entryway into this music. There was this sodade that lived within me that I have to say I haven't been able to express before in another form of music before I found the morna. That kind of sodade, of missing in India or a past or a family that's gone and that doesn't exist anymore, sodade, that kind of permanent immigrant exiled feeling for me was what I could sing in the morna. That is the blues. That's my Cape Verdean blues. It seemed only natural to go with Horace's great song.

Alison Stewart: Especially, I think this might be my favorite on the record.

Kavita Shah: Really? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Yes. [laughs] Let's hear Cape Verdean Blues from Kavita Shah.

[MUSIC - Kavita Shah: Cape Verdean Blues]

Alison Stewart: I love the simplicity of it, but also the sophistication of it with these great headphones on you can hear in the background. You shared that that happened while he was on tour with?

Kavita Shah: Madonna. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: How did this happen?

Kavita Shah: Madonna actually fell in love with Cape Verdean music in her last project, Madame X. She had a bunch of Cape Verdean Batukadeiras. It's women drummers from the island of Santiago. Miroca was one of the percussionists on the tour. He was in New York and at this point, I was producing the record and I said, "I think I want to call the record, Cape Verdean Blues, but I don't have the track recorded. Miroca. you're in New York. Do you want to just come in the studio, and let's try something."

We didn't have a plan for it. It just happened. He's very creative and was doing all those vocal percussions too. We just had so much fun with it. I think also, there's this part of me that as much of a traditionalist as I am in jazz and as much as I want to say, "Of course, I'm going to do Horace Silver," there's also a part of me that's like, "Well, any standard that I have to do, I'm going to do it totally my way or totally differently, in a way that hasn't been done before." There's probably a bit of both happening there.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Kavita Shah. The name of the album is Cape Verdean Blues. It is out now. You can also check out her live performance on New Sounds. We're going to go out with the song, Amor di mundo. What do you want to have people listen for in this track?

Kavita Shah: Amor di mundo means love of the world. It's a beautiful love song. It's just saying, "Let me sing my love to you, oh world." I really love the ending of it because it builds and there's some improvisation. I think this is a lot of people's favorite tracks. I hope you enjoy it, Amor di mundo.

Alison Stewart: Kavita, thanks for coming to the studio.

[MUSIC - Kavita Shah: Amor di mundo]

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