She was born in Lisbon, but always brings his Cape Verdean imagination wherever she goes. It's another side to the world that she carries in her music in a very peculiar, very personal way. Carmen Souza sings her memories with a smell of jazz, a very familiar odor, but it's definitely a different aroma.
From the beginning of your career always had the idea of fusing jazz and the music of Green Cape?
Carmen Souza: Yes, a musician, an artist or a creator so to speak never knows where the music will take them. But my idea was always to make a mixture of my African roots; in this case of Green Cape with something that was more contemporary jazz. I started by blending rhythms on top of rhythms and found that match up very well and have things in common and that is very interesting, you never can tell what the final product will be. I just got a new album that comes out in September or October where I take the standard jazz to the reality of Green Cape and in contrast, most traditional music from Green Cape to jazz. It is all recorded. Sing live can come to life and lead me to other avenues of music.
I know you were in Green Cape. What was the reaction of the population to this new sound that is not very traditional, but a merger?
CS: It was very good they recognize something that was Cape Verdean, because the rhythms were there. To an audience like this is not necessary to explain what a warm, a perfect binder, or a drumbeat, they identify themselves, know what it is, and know what is national music, but they see it as an evolution and so it is interesting.
Purists say nothing?
CS: There was none of that. I was very happy with it; I think it is a matter of communication. From the beginning I always very keen to pass on this to the people, I'm not a purist of Green Cape, I was not born, or grew up there, but I am part of a community who was born in another country, who always felt very close to its roots, because parents always had this, the food, music and the Creole language. I have always lived surrounded much of an idea that was very familiar to me and when I visit Green Cape nothing seemed strange.
You mixed iconic music of Zeca Afonso and Cesaria Evora, just to name a few. Did you feel certain modesty in using these stirring sounds almost personal and not transferable or not?
CS: When I picked up on songs like "song of my father," or songs like the "brave" and "saudade" in the background I try to transform them into my songs, or want to give them a little bit of me. There are so many versions of these songs, each artist has given their reality to each of these themes and I wanted to convey that. Brad Mehldau is a pianist who turns themes, can be rock or pop and gives them a completely different version, so that is what I fetched more from jazz.
The theme "saudade" is a nostalgic melancholy, has a deep sadness. In your version I do not feel this, there is nostalgia but is lighter.
CS: We know that we miss that one place, but that site is within us and we know that we are not helpless and that one day we will go back there. It's almost that.
Tell me a little of your new album, what's new?
CS: It brings back all this new sound, many original and my travels, because I'm singing all over the world and this has fed me. A musician is only really a musician when he goes out and exposes is music on stage and shares all this sounds in real time with people , is a game of give and take. A musician in his den, studying the notes and nothing else turns out to be a laboratory, is very clinical. When we leave and go to the stage we are taking what is true.
The songs came on tour or you just wrote when you're at home?
CS: Usually the creative process always begins with Theo Pas'cal. He is the person I am working for ten years and also I have developed this sound. It was he who brought me to the music and part of it all is and what we do not compose, keeping everything going for that time, we sat down and the music arises. He sometimes writes a bass line I hear on a melody and I hear words in the notes and write the lyrics.
You write the lyrics in Creole or Portuguese? You are from Lisbon.
CS: The theme occurs to me in Creole and then it's all extra. It is a very musical language, I use many accents, the island of my parents is more calm and mellow and I use it in many parts of the song, or if I want something harsher, more aggressive I use of the Creole of the Beach which is very interesting. Playing with sounds, words, with dictions, all this brings a lot of spice to the music.
How do you see yourself, how would you describe in the music world?
CS: I see myself as a musician. My way of using the voice is also similar to an instrument. It is curious that after all this time I realize some things, the music that my father was always listening at home the more traditional instrumental, heard much Luis Morais, the voice of Green Cape and all that was caught by my ear and it is not a coincidence that when I use the voice I remember the trumpet or the saxophone and think of using it like that. Then there are the influences of an Ella Fitzgerald, a Billie Holiday, I see myself as a musician that plays the piano and the guitar because I see the music differently.
http://www.carmensouza.com/
