Sara Tavares, Balancê (Times Square, 2005)
After several years' absence from the world music scene, Sara Tavares returns to deliver a hip, sensuous and incredibly smooth new release, Balancê. This is music so palatable, it's difficult not to compare it to chocolate, to fruit smoothies, to rum cocktails. But I'm going to try -- for all our sakes -- to dispense with the food analogies. Suffice it to say, this CD is delectable.
Balancê opens with the title track, which sets the standard for the rest of the CD. It is light and celebratory, hard not to dance to. Tavares mixes African and Portuguese rhythms with pop melodies, and her compositions have an incredibly feminine feel, though they hum with strength drawn from her Cape Verdean heritage. Tavares not only sings lead vocals, she sings backup vocals, plays the acoustic guitar, tambourine, triangulo, "tunder tube," and vibratone -- all on the opening track. Amazingly, she also wrote and composed all the songs and arranged and produced the entire album herself. A true talent, here. Find out more about her at her official Web site.
Tavares herself was abandoned by her parents as a child. Her father left for America and her mother moved south, leaving the young Tavares to be raised by an older Portuguese woman. Listening to her light-hearted, accessible music, it's hard to reconcile a life of struggle and displacement with such musical joy. Every song becomes a love song; love for life, love for heritage, love for oneself, love for others. The song "Lisboa Kuya" is a love song for the city itself. The English quote beneath the song's otherwise untranslated lyrics reads, "To walk Lisbon's streets on a late afternoon; taste its corners, secrets made out of light...eating cherries, enjoying the river's breeze and everything which is good, and sweet (everything which is kuya)."
Tavares effectively mixes multi-cultural slang and multi-lingual words into her lyrics. The song "Bom Feeling" combines a Portuguese word with an English one to form a phrase which Tavares translates as "Good Feeling," and the song "One Love" -- one of the catchiest and most memorable of the album -- is liberally dosed with English phrases, capturing the most basic elements of the sensuality the song conveys: "I love you...you know I need you...I can't live without you..." With the honesty and compelling, almost hypnotic quality of Tavares's delivery, I believe it.
This is how a love letter should make one feel, and in its entirety Balancê is just that: a love letter, sent as a series of harmonious packages presented as ballads. Sometimes delivered with exuberance (as in the tracks "Balancê," "Bom Feeling," and the Afro-Beat "Poka Terra"), sometimes thoughtful reserve ("Lisboa Kuya," "Planeta Sukri," "Muna Xeia") or wistfulness ("Guisa," "Ess Amor"), sometimes out-and-out sexual allure ("One Love," "Amor é"); all delivered with unflagging talent and something that feels suspiciously like truth. A pure treat all 'round.
