WOMAD

Cesaria Evora

From Cape Verde

The music world is awash with unlikely tales, but few are more unlikely than that of Cesaria Evora. For starters, if you come from the Cape Verde islands, stuck way out in the Atlantic Ocean, the odds are against you getting even remotely close to worldwide fame. Add to the equation the fact that you’re into middle age and you’re rarely without a lit cigarette, and a career as an international singing sensation seems as implausible as finding a hen with teeth. But this doesn’t account for the remarkable person that is Cesaria Evora, a woman for whom age is merely a number on a birth certificate. Kickstarting her career in Paris well in her late forties, it wasn’t long before Le Monde trumpeted that “she belongs to the aristocracy of bar singers” and that her 1992 album Miss Perfumado catapulted her to international attention, selling over 200,000 copies in the process. And since then, she’s never looked back, recording a string of impeccable albums and giving beguiling live performances, the latter marked by both the aversion to footwear (that bequeathed her Barefoot Diva nickname) and that none-more-smoky voice, helped no doubt by that prodigious tobacco intake. A real treat.