6 - Playing My Culture (1988–)

Summary

I believe I can serve no purpose playing American music, but if I play my own music, I will do some good things for my people. I don’t make that much money, but I will be more satisfied, you know? Playing my culture, you know? I don’t know if you can understand me.

— Norberto Tavares

In a gradual succession from novice Black Power keyboard player in mid-1970s Lisbon to an emerging songwriter and activist in the late 1970s to a bandleader in the 1980s, Tavares was well-suited for success by 1990. He realized his dream for his own recording studio, establishing a dedicated home workspace called Studio Mensagem (Messages Studio) in New Bedford. Using this studio and gear, he was able to produce a series of new solo works as well as recordings for others. This chapter focuses on Tavares’s compositional techniques and song ideas, analyzing and transcribing selected songs from his seminal LP Jornada di un badiu (1989) in order to unpack the meaning of their lyrics and the musical details of his distinctive compositional style.

Studio Mensagem and Tavares’s Songwriting Style

Tavares’s recording studio opened new entrepreneurial opportunities and facilitated new creative works. Around 1989 he moved from the Cabo Verdean enclave in East Providence to New Bedford. Tavares considered New Bedford to be the center of the Cabo Verdean American life and sought out the community there for business and social reasons. He soon found support for his work as well as stability in his personal life in the form of Rita Almeida, a petite, beautiful Cabo Verdean emigrant woman in her twenties. They married in February 1991. Rita had a young child, Manuela (also called Oriana), from a previous relationship, and Tavares warmly accepted this little girl as his own, expressing hope that the marriage would lead to more children in coming years. Tavares and his growing family soon moved to a spacious New England triple-decker apartment located at 5 McGurk Street in the New Bedford South End neighborhood close to the harbor. This large apartment was his home for the rest of his life. In the early 1990s the apartment was always filled with life, activity, friends, and family when I visited.