{"id":42907,"date":"2016-11-09T12:57:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T11:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/notre-reporter-local-vous-fait-decouvrir-un-veritable-panorama-de-la-musique-africaine-a-lisbonne\/"},"modified":"2020-05-06T11:20:54","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T10:20:54","slug":"african-lisbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/african-lisbon\/","title":{"rendered":"Music in the City: African Lisbon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"chelas-c-bruno-simao\"<\/p>\n

Lisbon has long been listening to Africa, Brazil and Carribean, and for more than 50 years, the city has been the melting pot of constantly evolving blended black music genres.<\/h4>\n

In 2014, as I started to come more often to Portugal, I already knew fado music, sung from the North to the South of the country, in Porto, Coimbra and Lisbon, its birthplace. For the last ten years during the yearly visits to my Portuguese relatives up North, I had never missed a chance to go and merge into the Alfama neighborhood in Lisbon, where I would listen to this chant delivered by amateurs, that they call <\/span>fado vadio<\/span><\/i> (stray fado or thug fado).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"fado-vadio-3\"<\/p>\n

But in the popular Mouraria neighborhood that I started to explore two years ago, I\u2019ve been discovering pieces of Africa in every street. Lisbon would be such a pale and sad city without them. I then learned to enjoy the Cape-Verdian <\/span>cachupa<\/span><\/i> that Beto used to cook in his restaurant next to his own house, or the <\/span>past\u00e9is de milho<\/span><\/i> that Maria put on her menu next to the Angolan <\/span>muamba de galinha<\/span><\/i> in the tiny place she runs, called S\u00e3o Cristov\u00e3o. A few meters away, the Mozambican chef Aziz offers generous portions of curry prawn served with <\/span>quiabos<\/span><\/i>. In those places, dinners often ended with live afro music played by friends of the owners.<\/span><\/p>\n

The memory of a specific night in Lisbon is still very vivid. It was a Monday night and as I was walking along the famous yellow tramway tracks, I spotted a hand-painted board that read “Shilabo’s”, the name of this tiny Angolan restaurant. As it was already too late to order the <\/span>muamba de galinha<\/span><\/i> or the <\/span>fumbua de cavalo<\/span><\/i>, I opted for beer in a small glass bottle and sat at one of the three tables of the minuscule dining room, occupied only by two other customers. At the table on my left, three musicians were jamming, and I would later get to know the identity of two of them: Chalo Correia from Angola, Bilan from Cape Verde. Both are excellent guitarists and their voices are strongly emotional. Their friend took good care of the percussions, hitting the beer bottles with a simple knife, and shaking the table mats and small maracas. The improvised band performed a series of Cape Verdean mornas and Angolan sembas, that immediately made me forget about fado, the only music from Lisbon that would give me goosebumps and teardrops until then. That was it: I was trapped into this music that I would investigate, dissect, compare, feel, listen and dance to for the next months. It\u2019s as if a completely new and parallel world had just opened into Lisbon, the city I had already fallen in love with ten years before. It was love at first sight, again, but this time with the African Lisbon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, the Portuguese capital city has also been the melting pot of constantly evolving blended black music genres for more than 50 years. It\u2019s a characteristic that cannot be ignored when looking at the history of a city located at the crossroads of three continents: Lisbon has long been listening to Africa, Brazil and Carribean.<\/p>\n