Best of Lura

Proof that the Cape Verde renaissance has come of age, this anthology confirms Lura as her own generation’s elder stateswoman, even if it might have done so with a slightly more discerning tracklist. It’s hard to believe that she’s been around since the AIDS awareness compilation, Red Hot &Lisbon, in the late 90s. Yet it’s indicative of Cape Verde’s rise to prominence that Lura and her ex-pat contemporaries would likely dominate such a project today. ‘Nha Vida’ is the track that appeared on that album and it’s here in all its vaulting ambition, a lushly orchestrated pop ballad with just enough morna to bend the ear of an audience newly ravished by Cesaria Evora’s Café Atlantico.

Cesaria’s here too on ‘Moda Bo’, a previously unreleased duet, singing an understated, almost ghostly counterpart to her riper-voiced protégé. It’s confirmation that Lura knows the intimacies of her own talent better than anyone else. It’s baffling, then, why the similarly previously unreleased ‘Amor E Tão Sabe’ – by far the most haunting track in her whole repertoire – was left off 2006’s M'bem di Fora in favour of the likes of ‘No Bern Fala’ and it’s debatable whether the slickly choreographed pop-funk of ‘Quebrod Nem Djosa’ best represents 2009’s Eclipse. Elsewhere, Lura’s somewhat mercurial talent is traced through the chant of ‘Na Ri Na’, fierce syncopations of ‘Ma’n Ba Dês Bês Kumida Dâ’, mid-decade genre workouts like ‘Fitiço di Funana’, and on to the mesmeric Luso-tango fever dream of her recent collaboration with Napoli’s Kantango. The in-concert DVD offers an authentic portrait of Lura shorn of studio fluff: in place of cloying backing vocals are Voz de Africa, wickedly percussive for all their grandmotherly appearance.