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Samba with soul

Cibelle makes a late debut in the Golden City
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
December 5th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The Brazilian singing sensation has put a new face on world music with her distinctive take on Tropicalia.
Cibelle

When: Saturday, Dec. 8, at 7:30
Where: Palác Akropolis
Tickets: 400 Kč, through Ticketpro and at the venue

The acclaim for Cibelle Cavalli came quickly after the release of her eponymous debut album in 2003. On that disc, the petite 24-year-old Brazilian singer upgraded her native Tropicalia sounds with a suave and sophisticated vocal presence, influenced by electronic music, offering a mix of songs in Portuguese and in English (similar to AIR). Production work by Suba (the late Mitar Subotic), the Sao Paolo–based Croatian producer and musician, helped give it a universal appeal. (Cibelle had made her vocal debut three years earlier on Suba’s sublime electronic Sao Paolo Confessions.)
Now based in London, where she recorded most of her newest release, The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, Cibelle has taken the next step musically, going for a darkly atmospheric, experimental folk-rock sound with a neo-Tropicalia and samba-soul twist.   
Cibelle likes to play with sounds made not only by conventional musical instruments, but handy found objects. As a result, her songs can sometimes be bewildering. But they’re always fun, a reflection of the good time she obviously had making the recording.
This is true even for sorrowful laments like “Green Grass,” a delicate Tom Waits cover, as well as melodic dreamscapes like “London, London,” a song by Brazilian musician Caetano Velasco, a co-founder of Tropicalia, written while he lived in exile in London in the early ’70s.
In an interview done for French television last year, Cibelle talked about how much she loves traveling and performing in new cities around Europe, adding that she has almost run out of new places to play. “Europe is pretty much covered,” she said. “And so whenever something like Russia happens, I am so excited … and so now I’m also thinking, I haven’t been to Iceland yet.”
While Cibelle is automatically put in the “world music” category, her own definition of the term is different, and offers a short lesson in globalization. In the French TV interview she said, “When you say ‘world music’… immediately you think of someone from Africa, dressed in costumes, and, if you are from Brazil, you are supposed to have your hair curly, and look a certain way and be playing some sort of samba. I feel like it has become some sort of pop market. If you want to be part of the world of world music, you have to do the ‘world music’ thing … you have to have loads of twigs, and I don’t know, beads. I really get that feeling sometimes.
“But world music doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean anymore. I think that now, everybody is doing world music, because it’s all open, it’s all on the Internet. The world is the world and, you know, everybody is exchanging anyways; it doesn’t matter.”
With only two albums to her credit, Cibelle has already achieved a remarkable notoriety. Maybe it has something to do with those other-worldly “dried electric leaves” that she’s possibly been smoking? If that’s the case, Palác Akropolis is one of the best venues for her to play for her debut appearance in Prague.
And she can scratch another European city off the list.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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