Artist Description

“An album that matches light, soulful vocals with rhythmic, subtle and inventive acoustic instrumental work” - The Guardian, UK

The son of a popular violinist raised in the port city of Ribeira Barca in Santiago, Tcheka (Manuel Lopes Andrade) honed his performance skills at the island’s village dances and festivities. At 15, he left home for the wider horizons of Praia, finding employment as a cameraman for Cape Verde’s national television channel. It was there he met José da Silva, whose Lusafrica label had become internationally known as a champion of what many now hail as a Golden Age for Cape Verdean music.

His first release, 2003’s Argui, was one of the first recordings completed at Cape Verde’s new Harmonia studios. His followup recording, Nu Monda, was the first to find its way to American shores via Times Square Records in 2005.  Nu Monda also secured Tcheka the Radio France International Music of the World award for “Artist of the Year,” which in turn led to an electrifying debut at WOMEX in Seville.

Tour dates with Cesaria Evora followed, and an audience beyond Europe developed quickly. Tcheka soon crossed paths with Brazil’s maverick rocker Lenine, who jumped at the chance to help shape the young, socially-conscious singer’s third effort.

The resulting Lonji spotlights a performer whose vocals are softer and closer to the ground than other Cape Verdean artists. The recordings also shows a songwriter with a delicate but sure international sensibility, and with a cameraman’s eye for landscape and detail.

Tcheka’s songs are deeply rooted in Santiago’s batuku tradition, which traces its roots to women working in the fields under Portuguese colonial rule. Banned from using drums, Santiago’s women bound up cloth in tight bundles to serve as percussion instruments, creating a low-key backbeat to their songs of births, deaths, hopes and heartbreaks.

For Tcheka, the tradition is more than history, it is musical path to understanding the present. On Lonji, the young singer has crafted a music full of quiet social commentary, transposing the beats to acoustic guitar, dilating and contracting batuku to include funk and jazz, yet staying uniquely Cape Verdean.

As creative as the women whose music he updates, Tcheka employs such everyday items as hubcaps and telephone books for percussion. The result is an album that transports batuku tradition from the past to the present, carrying the echoes of Santiago’s defiant storytellers into a modern age.