Pour Me A Grog: The Funaná Revolt in 1990s Cabo Verde

Anyone who has come across Madonna's latest album may have noticed the singer's recent love affair with Cape Verdean music. In ‘Batuka’ she incorporates batuque music, while in ‘Funana’, well, she just names the song after one of the country's most popular rhythms. It's a small hint of the attention we should all be paying to this hypnotic music born in the interior villages of Santiago at the beginning of the 20th century. For several years, its rural background and its physical nature made it a music forbidden by the Portuguese colonisers, who preferred to be entertained by morna, a genre more elegant and less prone to ignite any kind of revolt.

So funaná only became truly popular after Cape Verde's independence in 1975, with the groups Bulimundo and Finaçon becoming the first national phenomena a decade later. Pour Me A Grog, a marvellous, albeit short compilation put together by Vik Sohonie, is a valuable portrait of funaná in the 90s, when it finally started to be documented in the studio. The collection doesn't fail to summon up crucial protagonists like Ferro Gaita and Bitori Nha Bibinha, with their inflectious gaita (the local name for diatonic accordion) leading steamy and frantic tracks like ‘Rei di Tabanka’ and ‘Mô na Máma’. But the release also sheds some light on lesser-known Fefé di Calbicera and Etalvinho Preta, and the prodigious Orlando Pantera.