Tcheka


    At Manuel’s birth, Nho Raul Andrade could hardly have imagined that his son would outgrow his native Cape Verde with such verve. Nho was an established musician in his own right, one of the most popular violinists on Santiago, Cape Verde’s most “African” of islands. Nho and his ten children lived in Ribeira de Barca, a sleepy fishing village of a dozen houses on Santiago’s west coast. With young Manuel and his brother tagging along, he would whip up the local parties, anniversaries and balls with his vibrant renditions of the local batuque songs. At his side, little Manuel learnt the hard way to master the complex rhythms he was later to transform.
    By the age of 15, he was composing his own songs, aiming to widen the appeal of his island’s trademark style. Manuel would soon blend in morna chords, throw in the African American funk he enjoyed on the radio, and underpin it all with the tchabeta rhythms Cape Verdian women had preserved in the days of slavery. But before his fame spread under the stagename Tcheka, Manuel worked as a television cameraman in the capital Praia. In his spare time, he hooked up with journalist Julio Rodrigues to compose songs they would play in the steamy bars of the port. Tcheka participated in the uninspiring compilation Cap Vers l’Enfant II and a superb collective work on Cape Verde’s new generation of artists which included Djingo, Vadu and Princezito.
    It did not take long for José da Silva of the LusAfrica label to hear about this new talent on the block. The man behind Cesaria Evora’s international success quickly signed up Tcheka and they recorded Argui! Too quick, perhaps. This debut album is a far cry from the Tcheka who was later to reveal himself as a refined and thoughtful musical poet. Syrupy arrangements and a wayward artistic direction left little of redeemable from his first release.
    Tcheka’s follow-up album is a different matter. Nu Monda (“weeding”) lays out a panoply of powerful musical narratives that challenge the established order and re-invigorates Cape Verde’s time-and-tested heritage. “His songs are like brushstrokes,” claims an unsigned article on Tcheka’s myspace site, “redolent of the originality of his art, heir to batuque,…the beat of African resistance that even the prohibition of drums and the repression of the colonial period failed to stifle.” This second album earned Tcheka the prestigious Discoveries award from Radio France International in 2005. It stamped him as a worthy inheritor of the late Orlando Pantera who had dragged batuque music out of the folklorists’ ghetto and into the 20th century.
    “You might call Tcheka a sort of pop griot,” pursues the article, “a storyteller whose chosen backcloth is Cape Verde’s rural lands, its animals and plants, its rocks, paths, droughts and rains.” The instant international recognition for Nu Monda was amplified by the singer-guitarist’s electrifying live performances. What the specialist Osvaldo Osorio calls “narrative songs” went down a treat worldwide, thanks to the charisma and vitality Tcheka displayed onstage. Ironically, he is as confident and at ease while performing as he is shy and introspective off-stage. Yet, at 34, there is an iron-steel resolution to stamp his identity on the world music scene, a determination which continues to grow.
    This is best exemplified by his 2007 album Lonji (see the Mondomix review of these 14 tracks). Refusing to sit on the laurels he won for the 2005 release, Tcheka added elements of Creole rock, electronica and transatlantic percussions to his Santiago music. “Tcheka is a key figure in the musical movement that has transposed (Cape Verdian music),” underlines the myspace article. “(It) has established itself as a turning point in the evolution of the archipelago’s musical identity – a newborn infant awaiting the recognition that baptism brings.” A fittingly poetic description of the music from a man that has shaken up his island’s traditional styles, underlined its African roots and proven that it can be modernised and transposed to other fertile grounds.

February 2008.

Daniel Brown

Artist website