Kavita Shah: embracing the saudade of Cape Verde

Kavita’s work sits at the intersection of modern jazz, new creative music, and world traditions. The impetus for her visit today was her 2023 tribute to African legend Cesária Évora, Cape Verdean Blues (2023). We discuss music, her personal experiences as a lifelong New Yorker of Indian origin, her work as an advocate for gender and racial equity in the arts, and more.

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Thank you again for making time to do this. I really loved listening to the record. It was beautiful. Before we get to that, there was something in your biography that I wanted to ask you about because it seemed so unique, and that was this offhand comment that you said you discovered jazz at age ten. That seems so anomalous to me. I wish I had discovered jazz at ten. I would have ten more years of listening pleasure under my belt, but I’m so curious: how does a ten-year-old come across jazz?

Kavita Shah: I was singing in a professional children’s choir called the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and I joined it at the age of ten. There were two divisions at the time. Now, it’s this gigantic organization. At the time, it was still very early in the organization’s history. We had a junior division and a concert division, and I was ten years old, so I was in the junior division. All I wanted in life was to be in the concert chorus because, to me, they were just so cool, and they did really beautiful and complex music, and they were so tight, and musically, it was so compelling. One year later, I joined their division. Two of the songs in the repertoire were “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which, of course, Ella Fitzgerald made famous, and “How High the Moon.” In both of them, there were some really fun elements. For in “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” there was some choreography that we used to do, and in “How High the Moon,” there was a solo section, like the “Ornithology,” the contra that Charlie Parker wrote in “How High the Moon.” They were the more fun songs. They were the more engaging songs. They were syncopated. They were just interesting, and I loved being part of it, and I loved doing the choreography, and I loved the aliveness of the music, and that was my introduction to jazz. Because of that, I started listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday through these two songs being introduced to who they were and their work from quite an early age. It’s funny because there’s no real reason why. I was listening to hip-hop at the same time. I was growing up in New York City. It’s interesting to me how I was really attracted to this music from the 1930s and '40s. It wasn’t to the exclusion of enjoying other music and my contemporary music, but it was just something that I loved and was attracted to.

LP: In a very specific way, did that start a journey for you? Did you start to explore other jazz vocalists or jazz-adjacent music, or did that come later?

Kavita Shah: You know, I was quite young, so exploring music was still–I wouldn’t know how to do that as a child, but I did gravitate towards those recordings at home. My dad had a Dizzy Gillespie CD. I would learn some of the solos on that CD. “Manteca” was on that CD. I remember just dancing around to it, embodying the music. I liked some of the early swing music. Yes, it was the start of a journey. It was something that went deeper than, say, Brahms or other things that I was singing. Maybe I liked the music, but I didn’t go home and feel a need to know more. But there is something about jazz that I think I saw myself or my own story mirrored in, and I found it fascinating for that reason. I felt a sense of freedom or possibility in it, and that started a journey for sure.

LP: It’s really interesting because to hear you contrast it to something like Brahms or some of the other music you were exposed to or you were singing at that time, to someone who isn’t necessarily immersed in a classical canon or was just sort of new to it, you’re almost describing the exact reaction someone would have, right? If you put some classical pieces to an untrained ear, if you will, and some jazz vocal pieces, most listeners would probably say, “Oh, this jazz stuff sounds more alive. It sounds more bouncy.” It’s really interesting that as a child, even your ear recognized that and said, “This is a funner way in.”

Kavita Shah: I think I loved classical music as well. I mean, I was playing piano from the age of five and Western classical piano. So I don’t see it necessarily as either/or as much as there was something in my life that I needed jazz for. I don’t know that everybody would have that reaction. I certainly do, but I think there was something deeper there. There was something about coloring outside of the lines, of rhythm not being as strict, of, I guess you said the word “fun.” I think classical music can also be fun in some ways too, if it’s done well. But I think it was more about something being different in jazz, and I’ve always felt different and outside of things, even at that young age. That story attracted me.

LP: I appreciate you specifically referencing Ella and Billie Holiday. As it happened, I was just reading a piece today while I was eating lunch about Billie Holiday. It was a little dated. I think the piece might have been written in the '60s. Some of the language was dated, and some of the assumptions were dated. Still, there was a point the author was making about how, at that point in time when he was writing, there was an element of Billie Holiday basically in all jazz vocalists. Like she was so profound in the same way that there was some Louis Armstrong in every trumpeter, that she was inescapable. Some element of Billie Holiday seeped into all vocalists. So here we are sixty years after that article was written. Does something like that resonate for you, or was that just an artifact of its time?

Kavita Shah: Sure, I think of Billie as, speaking of freedom, as just total freedom from structure, from rules, from form. She’s just completely irreverent and doing her own thing. I think also the pure emotion. It’s a kind of yin and yang to Ella in a way, or for me, that’s how I always grew up thinking about it, where Ella was perfection. Everything’s perfect. Every note. Everything’s in tune, and every word is well enunciated, and just everything is executed. Even in her improvisations, everything’s very clean and controlled. And Billie, it’s just, it’s like a mess, but there’s so much emotion. There are so many colors, and she’s known as really someone who was imitating horn players. The way horn players would try to imitate singers, she was really imitating horn players in terms of stretching, and it’s really about a sound and a tone and a kind of impressionistic color. I don’t know how you can’t be influenced by her.

LP: A lot of those adjectives you used about her voice and her style, she truly is an artist whose life reflects all those same attributes in her voice. Even though she was known as a very good actress and interpreter, you would listen to her and say, “There is a life behind that voice.”

Kavita Shah: There’s just a rawness and an honesty. I sometimes run away from this because I don’t like the assumption that Ella wasn’t emotional. I think there’s a lot of emotion in what she does, and she is just such a strong artist. It’s not like she wasn’t an amazing artist. It just was different. She was different. I think in many ways, her art was the place in her life where–I think she had a very lonely life and she was a very solitary person. Her art and entertaining and performing was the place where everything is big and everything is controlled and everything’s here. For Billie, maybe it’s a little more the same. Her life is a mess. And the music…

LP: A little more on her sleeve.

Kavita Shah: Yeah, exactly. Her heart’s on her sleeves. For Ella, it’s, she’s coming to work, and everything gets buttoned up. She was a really notoriously shy person. On stage, she was an amazing entertainer and extrovert. It’s interesting. I haven’t talked about this in a very long day. I’ll have to go now after we’re done and put some Billie and Ella on for myself.

LP: Listening to it’s always better than talking about it. (laughter)

Kavita Shah: Yeah, exactly.

LP: There are some other strands that come up related to that, which I’ll come back to a little later, but another piece I wanted to ask you about–I hope I’m not making too broad of a stretch here–but something else I noted in your biography is you have a facility for language, or at least you speak a lot of languages.

Kavita Shah: Yes.

LP: On a sort of an obvious level, does that relate to your facility with music? Being that music is a language, et cetera, et cetera.

Kavita Shah: I think it relates to my relationship with music because I don’t think every musician has this relationship. But for me, there’s a very strong relationship, specifically between language and music. I’m blessed with a very oral memory. If I hear lyrics or if I sing them once or twice, I pretty much remember them. I think there’s something similar to language, which is about hearing sounds. It’s an oral thing for me more than–yeah, I’ve studied, and I can sit down and do all the exercises, and it helps, but it’s more about this living thing. I speak nine languages, and I’ve gotten more fluent by actually spending time with people and immersing in different countries and different cultures more than just learning it out of a book or something. I would say it is similar to music. I’ve learned the most by listening to and absorbing a lot of music. Something happens for me with learning and hearing at the same time that works with both music and language, especially when they’re together versus separate.

LP: Do you have perfect pitch?

Kavita Shah: I don’t think so. I don’t know if it’s a myth. I tend to know pitches. If someone asks me, “Well, is this a C?” It’s pretty much right because I know where they sit in my body, but I’m not one of those genius, crazy people that are like, “I can hear everything,” or “I can hear when something’s off.” I know people like that, but I can’t give it much importance to actually having perfect pitch.

LP: Sometimes it seems like it’s a parlor trick, you know, or that’s the way it manifests. Let me challenge you and see if you can do this. It’s like a memory game or something.

Kavita Shah: Yeah, I think that’s what it is, actually. It is a memory game. For me, it’s like, I know the keys in my song. So I usually start singing the song in a key, and then that’s–and then I’ll say, “Oh, okay, that I’m looking for D, so that’s D,” or something. But because, like I said, I know where they feel or where they sit in my body. I think it’s overrated.

LP: Plus, I think it’s inseparable from, to some extent, extreme training, too, right? I mean, ultimately, if you’re around music and you’re developing your ear and you’re playing with other people, yes, you’re going to build that facility, I would think.

Kavita Shah: Yes. I don’t see any need for me in my life to have perfect pitch, to call a pitch out. Because my whole relationship with music is about playing with other people. Automatically, when you have another person, everything is relative. Plus, I have a duo with a bass player, François Moutin. When it’s just a voice and a bass, it’s a string instrument. His pitch is definitely relative, or he’s playing on a different bass sometimes when we’re on tour. But even within a song, he might go out of pitch for one note and then come back in the next note. So it’s all bending. And I think beyond physics.

LP: In the context you just used as an example, it would actually be a curse because the fact that the deviations in the instrument would actually probably be annoying or distracting.

Kavita Shah: Well, it’s funny because it took–it is a very hard thing to play voice and bass alone, and it took me a long time to really trust my instincts because sometimes I would think I’m off and then the next measure I’d have to go back to what I was doing because maybe he was off for a measure. It’s the kind of context where we each have just actually to hold our own ground and hold our own. And of course, you listen, and you try to adjust a little bit naturally, but you can’t always change all the time for other people, I guess.

LP: That’s good as an artist. (laughter)

Kavita Shah: It’s like a life philosophy. You have to sort of be–you have to own who you are, but then I think naturally the ear adapts. So naturally, you hear something, and it adapts without me wanting to. If I sing a pitch and someone’s playing a half step away, naturally, my body’s going to go that way. It’s just that we’re not meant to live in dissonance in our bodies. It’s a skill. It’s hard. So naturally, that’s what the body wants to do.

LP: It’s looking for that reconciliation, sort of that equilibrium.

Kavita Shah: Have you ever sat in a yoga class where people do OM at the end of the class? They say OM, and it starts with many pitches.

LP: Yeah, yeah.

Kavita Shah: And by the end, everyone’s on the same pitch. That’s a very human instinct, to want to match the frequencies around you.

LP: To switch gears a little bit, something that was missing for me in my understanding of your journey is what initially brought you to Cape Verde. What was your connection there, and what was the pull there?

Kavita Shah: As we talked about, I grew up singing all kinds of music and particularly was drawn to jazz. I decided to become a jazz musician. Along this journey, I also got very into Latin music and Spanish and Portuguese languages. I majored in Latin American studies at Harvard, and I lived abroad in Brazil when I was twenty years old, studying Afro-Brazilian music and going very deep into the music of Brazil and Portuguese language music and also ideas about the diaspora. It was during this time that I discovered Cesária Évora’s music. She is a legendary singer from Cape Verde, West Africa, which, of course, was a former colony of Portugal. So they speak Portuguese and also a language called Cape Verdean Creole. That’s the indigenous language, which is a mixture of African tongues and Portuguese. I fell in love with her music.

As I was learning about music from the diaspora and especially from the African continent that had a relation with the Portuguese language, she was one of the big ones. Very luckily, just a few months after I discovered her, I was living in Brazil and she came to Brazil to perform at a festival. It was a festival in the city of Salvador da Bahia, which is an African city. It’s a ninety percent Black city. It was a festival called Ástica Brasil, so it was especially highlighting the connections to the continent.

This is relevant, and this is the research I was working on as well in Brazil. It’s relevant because it’s a country that suffers from a lot of issues of racism and of exclusion, especially political exclusion. Brazil never had–it’s a racial democracy similar to the United States, but it never had, for example, affirmative action policies. There has not been as much social mobility for different classes and especially different races. So you often have politicians or people in power that look a certain way, including in this state or this city that’s predominantly Black.

In Bahia’s music and politics, people have often looked to the diaspora for inspiration and ways to uplift themselves and make sense of this local situation by attaching themselves to, whether it’s the American civil rights movement or African liberation movements, this bigger identity of what it means to be a Black citizen.

I think for me, as a member of a diaspora, having grown up in the United States, my family’s from India, and having grown up in the United States, always being told I don’t look American or I’m not American, always feeling told what I’m not, that resonated with me, this kind of creating your own identity, creating your own connections to sort of make sense of who you are. That’s what I’ve basically done in my life. That was really inspiring for me as a young person, as a young artist coming of age.

In all of this, Cesária Évora from Cape Verde came to play at this festival two blocks from my house in Salvador da Bahia. She was just mesmerizing for me. That concert was one of those concerts that stuck with me for the rest of my life. I can still feel being there. I can still remember the power that she had just being herself. Actually, there’s something very similar–it’s interesting we talked about Billie Holiday because there’s something very similar in who Cesária was. All the stories I’ve learned about her–I’ve been with members of her family, very close friends, many musicians that she worked with that I now have the great fortune to work with–and all the stories of her about this very irreverent person who just did not care about what anybody thought, was completely herself, had a huge heart, but also very obstinate. There are stories about some very important person like Madonna coming to see her backstage or the King of Spain, and she said, “Well, who’s that? They can just wait with everyone else, or they can tell them to have a whiskey, and I’ll come out when I feel like coming out.” She didn’t pander to anybody. She was completely herself. There was an immense power in seeing a performer and a woman and a Black woman embody that on stage. She was not entertaining. She was not smiling very much. She was really just delivering the songs and in the songs. It was so powerful to witness that, to feel that as a young singer.

I loved the music. It was so beautiful. She touched the hearts, like mine, of many people around the world. The fact that this person from a very small, very poor island nation conquered the hearts of millions of people around the world was the power of who she was and the gifts she had. There was always this curiosity in the back of my head to one day go to Cape Verde, to one day understand her music more. It was this oasis, like this beacon of light of this is Cesária, this is where she’s from.

It happened many years later. It happened more than ten years later, when I had already established myself a little bit as a jazz musician. I’d already started releasing music and touring, and I needed a break one year from the hamster wheel of New York, the subways that we’re talking about. I went on a sabbatical trip to West Africa and spent a good amount of time in Cabo Verde and Cape Verde.

Very luckily, in the first week that I was there, by a series of coincidences and chance, I ended up meeting Bau, the master guitarist of the country who was Cesária’s musical director and who was the master of the kind of music that she was known for, which is called the morna. It’s a mournful ballad form. We just became friends. The luthier I went to–I bought a cavaquinho from him, and I asked him who on the island could teach me how to play the cavaquinho–and he said, “Well, you know, we have the best cavaquinho player in Cabo Verde on this island. His name is Bau.” I didn’t know who he was. So it was a really special encounter.

As soon as I got to his house, I saw the picture of Cesária on the wall. I heard him play. Then, very quickly, I started plotting how I could put the cavaquinho down and just start making music. So that’s what happened very soon. We developed a beautiful friendship and musical camaraderie that developed sharing my music, sharing his music, and learning some of the Cesária songs that I loved. It grew from there over a few years, over seven years actually of going there, coming back, going again, formally with a grant from the Jerome Foundation, where I went deeper into the music and culture, and then eventually recording an album together, which is Cape Verdean Blues, which came out just a few months ago on Folkalist Records. It’s been a really special, really beautiful journey.

LP: As it relates to playing with Bau and other musicians from any of the areas really that you’ve visited and explored and spent time in and collaborated in–I’ve talked to other artists from America who have worked with artists in other countries, from Caribbean islands and South America. There’s always, I’ll say it, and maybe I’ll try to say it more artfully, but there’s always sort of a power dynamic, right? Because especially the perception from the partnering musician of “this person’s from America.” Is there money involved? Is there exploitation involved? I’ve seen it more on the pop and rock side. I wonder if that dynamic manifests in the music you are making. How did the musicians–do they have representation? Is there a formalized business there? How are they protected?

Kavita Shah: Okay. Well, you’re asking two different questions.

LP: I guess so.

Kavita Shah: Right?

LP: I guess the nature of the inquiry is more the latter. How is it safe for them to participate with the modern business?

Kavita Shah: That’s a really good and interesting and complex question. It touches on a lot of things, especially today. I would say for me as a cultural worker, ethics is at the forefront of my work. I think I come to the table with, I hope, a degree of humility. I’m not just coming in and learning something and exploiting it. We didn’t plan to–I never planned to record an album. That happened years after I first started working with Bau.

Just coming in with a sense of a pure love for something and sharing. I think when you share with your heart and when your intentions are right, also you shine a light on those people. It’s not about, for me, extraction. It’s not about taking something and then making it mine or building off of it. But instead, it’s, this is something that I love. I want to learn it. Here’s Bau because he’s the master of it. I talk about him here. I talk about him everywhere I go. His name’s on the album as well. For me, that’s a collaboration rather than extraction. I don’t want to become a Cape Verdean singer. It’s not something that I want to exploit for my own identity or my own gain, if that makes sense. It’s something that I want to share, and not everybody’s like that. So, I think that having the right ethics and the right attitude is really important. I think also artists and other people feel that.

I don’t think if you were to ask Bau or the other artists I work with, they really think of me as Cape Verdean. It’s very sweet. They speak to me in Creole, and actually, Bau even said to me, “If the young Cape Verdean artists would research and value Cesária even a quarter of what you did, they would sound totally different.” It’s also meaningful for them, which is, of course, meaningful for me. I think this actually comes from jazz for me because jazz is about mentorship and it is about the older generations and seeking out personal knowledge from the older generations and also seeking blessings. Is this okay that I’m doing this? I’ve asked that sometimes. Is it okay that I’m recording this music? Or do you think I should do this? Or how do you feel about this? Sometimes I ask, and then hearing, getting that blessing from the older generation, for me, that’s what I need. Then I don’t care who else says anything because I know that I’m cool with them. That’s what matters to me.

In terms of their own protection, Cesária’s music is very famous. It made the people working with her very well known and made them a lot of money. There are a lot of copyright protections on all this music. It’s really interesting actually, because some of the music was traditional music. So all of a sudden, you have this hit, and it’s like, well, who really wrote that hit? There was a lawsuit for her song “Sodade,” the most famous song, because different people claimed that they were the real authors. But it’s also just this song that’s been done over and over locally and in different places. Who was really the first author? It’s really hard to know.

But anyway, now all those rights and laws are in place. There’s also a local version of ASCAP, or it’s called SCM. It’s Sociedade Caboverdiana de Musica. For me as a professional, of course, for any album I put out, I make sure that all my copyrights are in order and things like that. I can only speak about myself. I can’t speak about what they can do or can’t do, but I can speak about the philosophy and the ethics that I bring to the table with the people I’m collaborating with, where of course I’m making sure that everyone’s getting paid fairly, everyone’s getting recognition. Any opportunity I get, I’m speaking about Cesária, and I’m speaking about Bau, and I’m speaking about the other musicians I’m working with and the traditions and what they are. I’m not presenting them as mine. I’m presenting myself as, I hope, an interlocutor. I’m telling my story through this music. It’s a story of loss. It’s a story of exile. It’s a story of diaspora. That is how I connected with this music.

Cape Verde is a very isolated place. It’s by nature been a place of migration. There are more Cape Verdeans living in the diaspora today than in Cape Verde. You have this place where you have constant migration happening, whether it’s from the days of slavery or from the shipping industries for the past hundred years. There’s a large Cape Verdean community in Rhode Island and in Massachusetts because they used to work on whaling boats.

LP: Oh sure, yeah.

Kavita Shah: Or today, there are a lot of Cape Verdeans in Europe, and a lot of people went to West Africa. So it’s for me, the music is about that. It’s about that kind of impermanent quality and this searching for home. That’s the story of my life. That’s that word. It’s this nostalgia, but for a place that doesn’t exist anymore, or you can’t feel or see or touch, which for me is connecting as a child of immigrants to a home that my ancestors had, but that I don’t have access to anymore. Also living in a place where I’m constantly told is not my home, even if it is land. For me, that’s my connection with the music. I love the music. That’s why, that’s what it comes down to. I hope that Bau loves playing with me. We just feel good playing together. So that’s also what it comes down to as well. That’s the other side of cross-cultural connections, which is even when you don’t necessarily speak the same language or have the same background or the same tradition, when it feels good or when it clicks, you have this common language to tell those stories.

My story is not quote-unquote Cape Verdean in terms of my biography. Maybe the emotion, there’s something there that can tell the morna, can sing the morna. I think they connect to that, whether it’s the musicians or the public, even in Cape Verde, or anywhere that we play, really. That’s meaningful. Again, not trying to exploit it for my own means, not trying to become like the next singer of the morna or something, but rather I’m telling my story through this place and this thing that I connect to. I hope, at the same time, I’m elevating that music and bringing it to a larger consciousness.

LP: That’s very helpful. Thank you for going there. You really helped illuminate what drives the melancholy in that music and in that sound. Because it’s obvious to the listener that it’s there, but the source of it is complex for a lot of the things you’ve talked about, the history of the place, and even I guess the current of the place, right? The present of the place. If so many people are still leaving to go find their fortune or livelihood or future somewhere else.

Kavita Shah: One of my closest friends there, he just left to do his PhD in London, and his wife has a store there, so she can’t leave. She actually grew up in Portugal, was a child of Cape Verdeans, and moved back to Cape Verde. She’s founded her store. Now she has her life there, and they have a child. It’s so common, this kind of story of, “Well, we’ll just figure it out,” or, “I guess we’ll live apart for several years.” It’s just done. It’s like part of the culture. I just see that happening in pretty much every family that I know. There’s someone who’s abroad, or there’s someone who’s left, or there’s someone who’s coming back.

Another close friend, the father, worked in shipping for many years. So they would go on the boat for, I don’t know, eighteen months or eight months, to come back for one month a year. It’s a joke because you have to make the babies with this one month. (laughter) That they’re home and then they would go away again. Then, the next time they would come, the child would be a year older. It’s just very much the history of the place. It sounds heartbreaking, but it’s also true reality. It’s just life for a lot of people.

I think also finding a place where this kind of impermanence is normal. The society is by nature a Creole society. There were no indigenous people in Cape Verde when it was settled by the Portuguese. They brought slaves from Africa to Cape Verde. Then, of course, the Portuguese themselves or other Europeans settled. One interesting thing I find is there’s a lot of Indian history in Cape Verde. There were Indians who were serving in the Portuguese empire through their placement and power in India and in Goa, who would be stationed in Cape Verde. So many people I’ve met or seen, they’ll say, “Oh, my grandmother was from India,” or “This family that lived on the corner, they were Indian.” It’s not like in Trinidad. It’s not so present or so thought of, but at the same time, there is a history. There is this kind of, speaking of jazz and speaking of in general Creole places and Creole forms, there is this kind of opening for someone different, I think, to feel at home there, because there are people that just look very different living there.

LP: It almost sounds like you’re trying to describe; it’s less “othering.”

Kavita Shah: Less othering? What do you mean?

LP: Well, you’ve mentioned a few times, you know, being told about, someone trying to tell you you don’t belong or this isn’t your place. That’s the most aggressive form of othering I can think of. Or one of the more aggressive forms.

Kavita Shah: Absolutely. There’s also a word in Creole called “morabeza,” which means welcoming. There’s a song on my album called “Um abraço di morabeza” that I wrote with the elder trumpet player composer. He’s in his nineties. His name is Morgadinho. He wrote those lyrics actually about me coming to Cape Verde and learning to sing, sing the morna like a Creole. It’s very, very beautiful. Morabeza means welcoming. It’s like welcoming with open arms. That’s the nature of the culture as well. It’s a place where I felt very welcomed. It’s interesting. It’s like, I felt probably more at home there than many places in the world. It’s a place that, to me, feels like home.

LP: If I may, what was the nature of your research when you were in Brazil? What were you–you referred to your research, and I didn’t want to make any assumptions there.

Kavita Shah: I was talking about the Afro-Brazilian music that I was working with. I worked specifically with Bloco Afro, which is a kind of carnival organization in Bahia, and it was called Malé de Balé. There are two other very famous ones called Oludum, which Paul Simon worked with, Michael Jackson worked with. There’s one called Ile Ayé, and they’re both a little more famous, but Malé de Balé is also very well known in Bahia, so kind of the third one.

I did research exactly what I was talking about, about how they used these international icons of Black consciousness to make sense of their localized identity. So by having themes of carnival and having lyrics that directly dealt with Blackness in an international framework outside of this local Brazilian framework, identifying with liberation movements in Africa and America, identifying with slave rebellions and retelling their history in a way that maybe wouldn’t be told in schools or in history books.

Something that was very beautiful was they actually had an elementary school on their campus where they could control all these kinds of messaging they were giving to young Black children. So my thesis was called “Experiments in Transnationalism, Constructing Diaspora in the Bloco Afro Malê de Balê.”

I think what it brought to me, aside from this very rich, beautiful experience, was a few things. One is music for me, I think, is about culture. Maybe that goes back to what we were saying about Brahms. It’s really about people, and it’s about connecting to people. It’s about what music means in the community. It’s one thing to go and listen to the music and think that it sounds nice and it feels good at home. Still, it’s another thing to see it live and to understand what those lyrics mean for this community that gets together every Sunday and gives this very positive image of what it means to be Black to this community that’s very poor and very marginalized and excluded in their society.

So when you see that happening and that kind of social work behind the music or just the significance, the community ties take on a different significance. I think in whatever work I do, I’m always interested in that connection with the audience and also in how music lives beyond the page.

LP: Yeah.

Kavita Shah: I guess that’s what I was talking about, about the tuning as well, where it doesn’t matter to me because all that matters is that the music is good and it feels good and people are connecting to each other. That’s the power that music has. That’s when I decided, okay, I think this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

LP: I think this might be the proper segue point to ask you about your work with Ori-Gen.

Kavita Shah: Oh, yes. Ori-Gen is a collective of new Latin music, I guess you would say, or modern Latin music. We started it during the pandemic with a group of wonderful artists. It was actually started by Arturo O’Farrill. It was a group that got together to think about new ways to present music. During the pandemic, we did a lot of online curated programs. I curated two programs. One was about the Lisbon Diaspora, and one was about the Brazilian guitar showcasing different guitarists from all over Brazil. Of course, the online platform meant we could connect with people abroad and connect audiences from the United States to Latin America to Europe to beyond. That was really exciting.

They also put on two festivals in New York. I don’t know where it stands now. I think it’s not very active at the moment, but that was the impetus for getting together with Ori-Gen.

LP: It’s a fascinating organization. I wish I had known about it during the dark days. I would have loved to…

Kavita Shah: There are some great videos on YouTube of all kinds of topics, and I was really honored to be included, not being a Latino person myself, but having dedicated my life to Latin American music and folklore and obviously the music of Cape Verde and the diaspora. It was just, again, a really meaningful place to connect community and folkloric music and the meaning of what music is to different audiences.

I think we have this possibility in the next generation to connect across cultures and to use the internet to cross-pollinate these audiences. The album Cape Verdean Blues was just released on the label Folkalist Records. I founded that label and our vision is exactly this. It’s exactly to be able to have different artists from around the world. It’s a global music label, but focused specifically on the idea that global music doesn’t have to be this thing of the past. It’s not necessarily quote-unquote “primitive music” because that’s been a problematic part of the world music industry for a long time. You want to find the people in the village doing this kind of music from long ago. Rather…

LP: It’s a weird fetishization. Yeah.

Kavita Shah: Exactly. Rather, you have people that are taking folkloric traditions and they’re doing electronics with it, or they’re putting a string quartet with it, and it’s alive. It’s part of the 21st century. So, that’s one philosophy that we have with Folkalist. Another is the hope of bringing these different audiences together.

So, the next release we have is an Argentine singer named Juana Luna. You have music from Argentina, Cape Verde, hopefully the Indian subcontinent soon, and so on, where those audiences can find each other, and there are possibilities for direct and meaningful connections. That’s an important part of my work as well.

LP: Before you go, there’s one other thing that you talked about. I was reading the interview you did with Gwen Laster, the participant in the discussion. It seemed as though in my reading of it, you were almost in real-time processing your sort of relationship with or your manifestation of vulnerability in your work. I think it ties into the beginning of our discussion about Ella and Billie. I think it’s probably present in any art. We could pick any name out of that artistic hat and have an equally fruitful discussion about the role of vulnerability. Where do you stand today in terms of your comfort level when embracing and expressing that? Is it an ongoing process for you?

Kavita Shah: It’s definitely an ongoing process. I come from a culture where vulnerability is definitely not cherished or welcomed. I think also that’s very much the culture that we live in terms of the modern culture. Everything has to be perfect. Everything goes on Instagram or on social media, and it’s this final product. Or even vulnerability becomes like a product, you know, where people share these long posts or something, and they’re saying they’re pouring their heart out. Still, it’s also done in a way that’s like perfectly curated and soliciting attention and likes.

I think real vulnerability means sharing without knowing what you’re going to get in return and being okay with that or being willing to open something up without knowing if you’re going to be rejected. I like Brené Brown’s work a lot on vulnerability, and I go to that, and it’s hard. I feel every day as an artist, to some degree, there’s a choice between being more vulnerable and putting yourself more out there or taking a kind of safer route. It is a challenge for me, but one beautiful thing about the Cape Verdean Blues album and journey–we did a tour of twenty-five dates in the fall, it was a pretty extensive tour and a lot of interviews and a lot of TV programs and so on. Because it’s not my clear culture or my clear connection, I have to give some context to the audience or to the interviewer about why I am doing this music. To do that, I have to say because I have this melancholy that lives within me. I lost my dad quite young. I lost many family members young and just had this sense of a home that I couldn’t belong to or I couldn’t see or touch, which I think is a really universal feeling, but that’s like the essence of who I am.

It’s really sad, you know, and it’s sad. It’s not the first thing you say when you meet someone. Still, I actually find that it really helps people connect to the music because when I say that this is how I feel, and so I found morna. I love singing it; people say, “I know what that feels like,” because I think–I had someone come and say, “My family is from Norway, and I left,” and all kinds of people can resonate with that universal experience, that universal feeling.

That’s been really beautiful to see, like when I open myself up or share my story, it allows people to find their own way into the music. It allows that connection to happen. So it actually makes me a better artist and a better performer, and it makes my audience more engaged and interested in what I do. It’s not easy, but that’s what I’m saying has been a blessing with this project because it’s different; I’ve had to–I had to share it. It necessitates that I share those parts of myself. It’s been really beautiful to see that. So, I hope I can keep peeling my onion and keep being willing to share. I think it’s a daily, a daily choice and a battle. It’s scary every day. It’s scary to get up and put yourself out there.

LP: Some days, it’s scary just to get up.

Kavita Shah: Yeah, it’s true.

LP: Thank you for meeting me here and for having this discussion. I very much appreciate it. As I said, I love the record, and I’m very happy to be able to share this little platform as a way to tell more people about it.

Kavita Shah: Thank you, Lawrence, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness in your research and all the questions. It was a pleasure talking with you.