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Manuel Lopes Andrade, a.k.a. Tcheka, was born on the 20th July 1973 in the port of Ribeira Barca, Santa Catarina district, on Santiago, the most African island of the Cape Verde archipelago.   His songs are like brushstrokes, redolent of the originality of his art, heir to the Cape Verdean style of music known as Batuque – traditionally played with the tchabeta– the beat of African resistance that even the prohibition of drums and the repression of the colonial period failed to stifle.
Moving on from his previous album, Tcheka revels in new audacities. He contracts and dilates – now slower, now faster, more impassioned and intimate – different beats of batuque, a genre the artist maintains “still holds many paths to be explored”. At times, chords blend in, at others, the style seems to lean towards funk influences, without ever ceasing to be purely Cape Verdean.
You might call Tcheka as a sort of pop griot, a storyteller whose chosen backcloth is Cape Verde’s rural lands, its animals and plants, its rocks, paths, droughts and rains. His central character is the people of the archipelago, with their saints, holidays, customs and expressions, as well as universal themes of love, friendship, passing time, tragedies, hopes and joys.