Protegid

Carmen Souza may share a Creole tongue with her Cape Verdean-rooted contemporaries, but that's where the comparisons end. Her voice is singular, mercurial and slightly androgynous. It has a kind of dawn-to-dusk range that approximates several performers simultaneously, bearing more relation to Billie Holiday or even Tom Zé than to Mayra Andrade or Sara Tavares. The Theo Pascal-composed music on this, her third album, moves well beyond any kind of Cape Verdean comfort zone. So open are his arrangements to the restless switchbacks of jazz, and whims of Souza's larynx, that their debt to the archipelago isn't at all obvious.

The songs follow their own percussive logic for the most part, cajoled by Pascal's bass and caressed by clean-toned piano. With the focus of a standard, however, the results are compelling: ‘Sodade’ is rendered as a piano elegy, Souza's voice a parched whisper in a piece that curls from understatement to melodrama. And to hear her light up Horace Silver's ‘Song for my Father’ is a joy, with lyrics offered in tribute buoyed by a sensual rapport with Silver's spirit and Souza's own Fender Rhodes accompaniment. Only right at the end of the piece are there the beginnings of a direct quote from the original. The Souza-Pascal dynamic likewise finds its most original expression on grim closer ‘Mara Marga’, with expectorant gobbets of sound placed in brittle counterpoint to grieving vocal arabesques. It's not for everyone, certainly, but if you have the patience to run with Souza's muse, Protegid offers heady pleasure in small doses.