New Contexts, Styles, and Choices

Norberto Tavares spent his time during the 1990s with new studio recording projects, concerts inside and outside the Cabo Verdean community, several band tours, and family life. He released two more CDs with his own music, Hino de unificaçon (1993) and Maria (1997), and recorded and produced albums for others as business ventures. Several new factors shaped the direction of Tavares’s career in unexpected ways: 1) a local economic slowdown; 2) the rise of zouk as the music of choice of young Cabo Verdeans; 3) the rise of acoustic-influenced Cabo Verde styles popularized by Cesária Évora; and 4) increasingly serious health issues relating to diabetes.

Regarding contexts and venues for his music, Tavares broadened his audience base: arts organizations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts included Tavares and Tropical Power on their folk artist rosters, which led to some festival bookings, teaching, and other performances paid at union scale. However, as these new venues opened, live performance opportunities within Tavares’s own New England diaspora community significantly decreased. The New Bedford fishing industry’s decline cost many jobs, resulting in fewer people with the time or income to keep the Cabo Verdean social clubs going, and eliminating much of regular––albeit modestly paid––live performance work for local Kriolu musicians.

Styles and tastes changed, too, and support for Tavares’s funaná waned as audiences aged. Cabo Verdean diaspora youth chose to listen and dance to zouk-based sounds in nightclubs, not social clubs. Zouk, the French Caribbean popular style that emerged in the late 1970s, shared common rhythmic and cultural ground with the coladeira, leading to popular new hybrid styles called cabo-zouk, cola-zouk, and zouk-love. With origins in the Rotterdam Kriolu community, cabo-zouk dominated Cabo Verdean popular dance music from the late 1990s onward: “Despite cabo-zouk’s popularity with the younger generation, it would first be ignored, and later, when commented on, would draw the unremitting ire of many intellectuals, musicians, and those of an older generation.” Tavares was one of the people that didn’t embrace zouk—he preferred to keep writing music closer to his Santiago roots, which limited his music’s marketability.