Batuka - Madonna

Polyrhythmic batuku (or batuka) is both a form of music and dance and a form of resistance and memory. I was fortunate to visit a gathering of women in Cidade Velha as they practiced batuka drumming/singing/dancing during my January 2024 travel course. 

Notice I did not use the word "performance" because this was a private moment in a community of women, and some visitors were fortunate to gather around the edges of the space in which they were gathered. 

It had been a couple of years earlier that I learned of Madonna's performance with members of that same community. As much as I enjoy Madonna's work generally, I must admit I was skeptical about this video. But I learned about it from a Cape Verdean -- my kriolu language professor -- and so I accept it for what it appears to be: a visitor from outside being welcomed by Cape Verdeans, as I have been. That's morabeza. 

There is much more to be said about this music in general and this video in particular. For now, I am posting it in a way to facilitate sharing it with students in at least three different courses I am teaching in the fall: Detroit, Africa, and world music. It is relevant to all three! 

Batuku session in Cidade Velha, 2024
Photo by JH-B / Context in Cabo Verde Photos

Lagniappe

Read the Batuku-Finason article by my friend Gláucia for a rich description of this oldest of Cabo Verdean musical forms, several local videos, and Charles Darwin's experience with this music. Yes, that Charles Darwin!

Feliz Cumpli, Chepito

From the Facebook group Nicaragua y Su Historia, I learned that one of Santana's long-time percussionists was born in the city of León, a place full of visual art and historic lessons that I have enjoyed visiting close to a dozen times.  

The group posted this brief biography of Chepito -- with terrific photos --  on the occasion of his 79th birthday. From the post, I not only learned about his contribution to the music of Santana. I also learned that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland -- which I have visited three times so far -- has a much more poetic name in Spanish: Salón de Fama del Rock.

Chepito, from Nicaragua y Su Historia

He was with Santana in its early decades -- very early in fact. Among the several percussionists who were part of the Soul Sacrifice performance at Woodstock, he is the one in the red shirt. Mesmerizing.

All of this was before Santana the person pivoted toward predominantly Latin music -- as opposed to mainly English or acoustic rock. This Nicaraguan-born musician was not on Supernatural or many of the other albums that were produced primarily in Spanish. As of this 2025 writing, I am realizing that I have written several posts about Santana's Latin American music on my Environmental Geography blog, though not here on The Planet Sings.

Start the Day

Shamelessly lifted from social media, this cartoon reads (in Spanish):

HOW TO START THE DAY IN PEACE / ENOUGH COFFEE / GOOD MUSIC

It is fitting for both of the Geography Second-Year Seminars I offer at BSU (mainly as Honors courses). The nature of our SYS requirement is that if you take The Planet Sings you cannot take The Secret Life of Coffee. 

And vice-versa. Every student takes one FYS and one SYS course (unless waived by prior credits), but nobody can take more than one. Even a dean's "magic wand"cannot make that happen -- we've tried.

But fear not, SYS students! If you take my coffee class (or any of my classes) there will be some music. And if you take my music class (or any of my classes) there will be some coffee. Bastante coffee, in fact, and quite good coffee.

Lagniappe

 Colleagues and former students are always welcome to stop by class for a cuppa. It is always served with the music at the beginning of class. 

Cesária Évora

Over the past week or so, I have been pleased to participate in various aspects of our region's celebration of the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde's independence from Portugal. Amidst these varied festivities, I decided to reshare this photograph I took during our 2024 travel course on the islands of Fogo and Santiago. 

Public art in São Felipe celebrating Fogo and its music
as well as Cesária and morna

I was enchanted by this mural because it celebrates the island on which it is found, the music that is an essential part of that island's identity as well as Cape Verdean music much more broadly -- in the person of Cesária and morna -- one of several major genres of music in Cape Verde. (Note: these links are to English and Portuguese portions of the virtual museum of Cape Verde and its music, which my colleagues are curating in three languages. Please spend some time exploring, whether you speak English, Portuguese, or Kriolu.)

A few days ago, I posted another image of Cesária, this one taken during a recent tour of the new headquarters cultural center of the Cape Verdean Association in New Bedford. We were there when the group was showing progress at this facility to Prime Minister Correia, who was in the region to celebrate the anniversary with the South Coast diaspora community. 

A friend asked who this woman was, as she had just seen her image on somebody's shirt in Market Basket. I answered:

"That's Cesaria Évora. Best known for her rendition of the morna song Sodade. I had only been at Bridgewater a few years when a student brought me a CD of her music. I had been playing a lot of music in my Latin America class. 'I think you'll like this,' he said. That was my introduction."

I realized that I had left the phrase "my introduction" ambiguous, but I did not know exactly how tobe more specific. I wish I had kept up with that student so that I can tell him how much his gift of the Voz D'Amor  (Voice of Love) CD has been.

As a geographer who was new to the region, I had already been curious about this country with at least two names (Cape Verde and Cabo Verde) and a half-dozen common pronunciations. Standard maps and atlases had been of little help, because its identity as a country was still relatively recent. Also, it is not a cape, but rather an archipelago. Some sources include a cape in Senegal as part of the country, which it clearly is not. This CD helped push me to learn more, to pay more attention to the community around me, and to start making connections. Eventually this led to a travel course in 2006, many efforst to organize another, and ultimately a return in 2024. 

The CD was also my introduction to the language of Kriolu or Cape Verdean Creole. As of this writing, I cannot speak it, but I did study it for a semester and I know all the words to Cesária's signature song Sodade -- and to understand the deep meaning of that song. I am starting to understand the language when I hear it spoken. 

Lagniappe

To those reading this in 2025: please take the time to visit one or both of the temporary exhibits at the New Bedford Whaling Museum that were installed as part of the celebration. 

Mumbai Breakdancing

The Moth is a storytelling project that began in the village of Woods Hole (Falmouth, Cape Cod) and is now a global project that helps people to tell and share first-hand stories about their lives. The January 28 episode of The Moth Radio Hour features several fascinating stories, including B-Boys of Bombay, in which Jittesh Jaggi explains the first-ever fusion of hip-hop and Bollywood. 

Landfillharmonic

Even though a Paraguayan professor had a big influence on my in graduate school, I am pretty certain that Landfillharmonic is the only film I have seen that was set mainly in Paraguay. It is also one of the very best films I have seen about music and about teaching. 

I wrote about this film and its importance in my own teaching and scholarship in Musica: Paraguay, a 2022 post that I wrote for my "main" blog about a year before I started thinking about the Planet Sings. It turns out that the collaboration in that film is an exquisite example of world music as we are using the term in this course. 

Lagniappe

That professor I mentioned was Dr. Diego Abente, who taught the only course on Latin America that I took while working on my master's degree at Miami of Ohio. I later completed my doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies at Arizona, benefitting greatly from the insights I gained during that one course with Dr. Abente. The short version was that I was arguing for a rather simplistic approach to a complex political ecology situation. He challenged what was essentially transactional thinking on my part, pushing me to dig more deeply into essential context. He went on to serve in Paraguay's government before becoming Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliot School at George Washington University.

R.I.P. Dan Storper

 

It was from a mutual online friend that I learned about the passing of a World Music pioneer Dan Storper, and through that news I learned a bit about his life and how he came to found the Putumayo World Music label. The company Facebook page posted this remembrance: 

We are sad to share that Dan Storper, the beloved founder of Putumayo, passed away on the morning of May 22, two days after his 74th birthday. Dan had been battling pancreatic cancer for some time and was with his close family in New Orleans when his song came to an end.

Dan shared his passion for music and cultural diversity with the world and we believe he helped make it a better place. He touched the lives of so many people and those who knew him will remember him as a good soul with a kind heart, a positive spirit and a great sense of humor. He will be deeply missed.

His friend spoke of how he had first launched Putumayo clothing with a partner in Maine because of their shared love of textiles and travel. It was apparently an amazing store, but after she passed, he let go of that business and started the music label. 

Elsewhere on this blog, I make much of the role of David Byrne in launching world music, even as he came ultimately to accept some important critiques of it. But through Putumayo, Dan Storper was equally important in connecting people around the world through their music. 

It was in 2007 that I learned this while walking through a shopping mall in Managua, Nicaragua. I had already been collecting some of the label's CDs, most of which featured an array of artists from a given country at that time. Later, each anthology would include contributions across borders with a shared theme or musical style. 

What I noticed in the mall that day, however, was that at least for middle-class shoppers, the label was bringing music of the developing world to listeners in the developing world itself. In this way, Storper played a role in making the planet sing!