London Acoustic Set

Sheared back to not much more than her gravity-defying voice at London’s Green Note venue, Carmen Souza shows here that she is even more uncompromising captured performing live than the studio. And unless you’re familiar with Cape Verdean Creole you’d likely never guess it’s a voice with roots in the archipelago. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to say where she’s from; not for nothing has David Sylvian dubbed her sound ‘world soul music for the 21st century.’ Backed only with a scattering of percussion, guitar and the pangs of Theo Pas’cal’s bass, Souza invents her every utterance afresh, restlessly back-flipping from beat to beat along a vertigo-inducing spectrum of registers, timbres and moods, often exhilarating, sometimes exhausting and always in flux. Whether she’s extemporising jazz scat (‘Magia Ca Tem’), crooning lines in flawless English (‘Confiança’) or daubing a fearless collage of glottal stops (‘M’sta Li Ma Bô’), she’s forever toying with rhythm and phonetics. Though this relentless dynamism can sometimes leave the music rudderless, she and Pascal find their most thrilling focus in standards, vocal or otherwise. A joyous revision of Horace Silver’s ‘Song For My Father’ was arguably the highlight of 2010’s Protegid and here she reimagines it again, softening its cadences with hushed scat. Her take on Edith Piaf’s ‘Sous le Ciel de Paris’ is almost as creative, a singular whirl across familiar territory, sung on tenterhooks, while her closing reworking of the late Cesaria Evora’s signature song, ‘Sodade’, serves as a poignant tribute to her.