Cesária Évora and the sixteen-year-old at the piano

Cape Verde's run at the World Cup turned attention toward a West African island nation that most people knew by a single name. That name is Cesária Évora, the singer who carried her country's music into the world and died in 2011 at the age of seventy. “Sodade” is still the first thing that music says about itself.

Évora's longtime producer, José Da Silva, explains what she actually changed, and does it in two sentences. The first: “Here, in Cape Verde, in the past, you don't have a lot of women singing because it's not for the family. It's not nice to have a woman to sing.” The second, about the same place after her success: “With the success of Cesaria, something changed. And now in Cape Verde, the woman's a leader in the music.”

A whole career fits between those two sentences. And it is worth noticing that what shifted was not taste and not the charts, but who is allowed to hold the microphone. That kind of win does not show up in the numbers: there is no graph for the moment “unseemly” turns into “ordinary”. You see it twenty years later, when somebody else starts singing and nobody turns around.

In the capital, Praia, music drifts down a narrow alley from an open window — the singer-songwriter Fattu Djakite, rehearsing. She describes her music as a reflection of Creole identity: Africa mixed with jazz and blues. Sambaiana, a seven-woman Brazilian samba group, came to play the same islands; their vocalist and guitarist Rayra Mayara puts the Atlantic connection plainly — the music of Brazil is music from African roots.

The report ends with a piano. Sitting at it is sixteen-year-old Alicia Freitas, who says she wants to represent her country and to encourage others like her. From here, from Vilnius, that sounds like an ordinary sentence from a young musician. From a place where one generation ago it was unseemly for a woman to sing, it sounds like a continuation.