Lucibela

Lucibela is a smile; a fresh breeze ruffling the bougainvillea blooms and wave tops. The young Cabo-Verdean was born in 1986 on São Nicolau, one of the Barlavento islands – the ‘windward’ isles to the north of the Sahel archipelago. Now she has made her first album, Laço umbilical, the cord that links the singer to her land. Over its thirteen tracks, Lucibela-the-voice-of-gold explores the issues involved: being a woman and a Cabo-Verdean, living far away and loving with sensuality and grace. The secret of Lucibela’s extraordinary vocal technique lies in her ability to explore the deep register of Brazil’s great sambistas while adding a thrilling vibrato.

Written by old masters such as Manuel de Novas and the generation that followed (Jorge Humberto, Betu and so on), the songs from the traditional repertoire that Lucibela champions span decades. Lucibela takes guitars, cavaquinho, saxophone, accordion and violin – all the musical cornucopia of the islands – and blends them in the civilizational cocktail shaker of tablet computers and television. Lucibela projects an intriguing intensity, moving from pure emotion to audacious gambles to firm opposition. Laço Umbilical’s arranger and musical director is the ingenious acrobat Toy Vieira, Cesaria Evora’s associate, who has also worked with Lura.

Beneath Lucibela’s sweet, smiling exterior is a woman who has also experienced life’s hardships. That inevitable involvement of fate in art undoubtedly gifted the girl with her extremely feminine intuition. When she was in the last year of high school, her mother died and left the family destitute. To follow the dreams of her lost mother, Lucibela had to find a job that paid… and the teenager had a talent: singing.

Lucibela shrewdly realized that she could earn a living by singing in the hotels and bars of Mindelo, frequented by tourists who wanted to hear local songs. So she began to cover Cesaria Evora’s repertoire, beginning with Nutridinha, a joyous, beautifully crafted song about bad girls.

Keen to spend more time with her family and daughter, she recently moved to Lisbon. Lucibela explains that to go on learning and not lose her touch, and because singing is a sharing, candid, face-to-face experience, she still performs in the squares and streets. When she mentions that, a blissful smile gently lights up her face.