Mayra Andrade

In the organizer's words:

When it comes to Cape Verdean music in the 21st century, she is undoubtedly the voice of the future. Since her debut album Navega, Mayra Andrade has opened the doors of the Atlantic archipelago to the world. Now she is returning to the stage: with reEncanto, she presents an intimate retrospective of highlights from her career. The intimate duo set-up is completed by acoustic guitarist Djodje Almeida.

The Portuguese word encanto can be translated as "magic", but also as "jewel". There is no doubt that Mayra Andrade's presence and voice are magical - and her works are certainly jewels too. "A song written with sincerity and truth is timeless," she says. Even more: after ten or even twenty years, it can reveal completely new facets, reveal its second nature in a different sound context. reEncanto: the chance for the audience and the performer herself to relive great songs from her career, which has been running since 2006.

The concept for this show arose from an inner need. After the isolation of the pandemic period, Mayra Andrade first set off for completely new shores in person and announced her pregnancy in 2022: "I'm going through a very magical phase in my life right now. I am giving birth to life myself, there are two hearts beating in my body. This meant that I wanted to go to a nest, to the roots of my songs, which were also born from my belly. And so I created this place where I can share stories and feelings from the last 20 years."

She has found a dream partner in her fellow countryman Djodje Almeida. The guitarist translates the beats of the original pieces into inventive, sometimes complex, sometimes light-footed beat patterns, while at the same time setting melodic counterpoints. "I give him freedom and the autonomy to develop his own ideas. Like in a painting, he sensitively adds colors," says Andrade full of appreciation for her dialogue partner. The repertoire of reEncanto spans titles from all stages of Andrade's career: there are classics from her debut Navega, with which the singer made her first international appearance at a very young age in 2006 - as the cosmopolitan heiress of the great Cesaria Evora, born in Cuba, with life stations on the tropical Cape Verde island of Santiago, in Senegal, Germany, Angola and France. She colored her outrageously casual pieces with chanson, Anglo-American songwriting and Brazilian tones, and with the African heritage of Cabo Verde, which manifests itself in the rhythms of Funaná and Batuko. This blend was unheard of for the Cape Verdean soundscape at the time and continued on the albums Stória Stória... and Lovely Difficult. For reEncanto, she has picked out the melancholically grooving A-Min Kreu Txeu in the local language Kriolu from the latter.
And finally, Andrade also translates the electronic-influenced songs from her latest and most daring opus to date, Manga (2019), into the context of voice and guitar. Here - in Limitason or Plena, for example - the most astonishing metamorphoses take place, back from the dancefloor to the "nest" she refers to. "The voice and the message of a song remain, beyond physical boundaries," says Mayra Andrade. "A sound is capable of traveling into the realm of eternity." In this sense, reEncanto is an astonishing and touching testimony to an unexpected musical transformation.

Price information:

From 30€