A Lifetime of Persistence Brings Cesaria Evora to World Stage

Half a block isn’t such a long way, even on a midtown sidewalk teeming with people. But the walk from her chauffeured sedan to the talent entrance for “The Late Show With David Letterman” seems to take Cesaria Evora a long time. Autograph-seeking fans interrupt, and Evora wordlessly obliges them. She signs copies of her latest album, “Sao Vicente,” deliberately, as if each were a document of utmost importance.

Once she starts moving again, she walks with the world-weary shuffle of a woman who has lived a long while--she’ll turn 60 in August. Heavy steps betray a body that has borne too much weight, too many hardships and, maybe, too many heartbreaks.

Later on, Evora will make her U.S. network television debut, yet another step in her gradual rise to stardom here. Evora comes from Cape Verde, a tiny cluster of impoverished islands off Africa’s northwest coast. She’s been singing since she was 16 but didn’t become an international sensation until she was 53. Her last album, the Grammy-nominated “Cafe Atlantico,” sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. She tours eight months of the year.

Evora sings in the Cape Verdean language known as Crioulo, a Portuguese Creole sprinkled with West African words. Most Americans won’t understand the lyrics, but there’s no mistaking the mood. Her exceptional depth and expressiveness recall legends like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, with a husky alto deepened by a lifelong habit of two packs of Marlboro reds a day as well as 35 years’ worth of whiskey and cognac.

Evora was born in 1941 on the island of Sao Vicente. Her mother worked as a cook; her father, who died when she was 7, was a musician who played guitar and violin. From 10 to 13, she attended school, learning domestic chores. “This was women’s work around the house, but I didn’t like it, so I came out when I was 13,” she says.

Evora started singing as a teenager and soon became a local star. But the islands’ stressed economy couldn’t support a recording industry, and after Cape Verde gained independence from Portugal in 1975, its nightclub scene waned. Evora had borne three children, one of whom died of a fever, and was struggling to raise her family on her own. In 1975, gravely disappointed, she quit performing and moved in with her mother. She was 34.

“You could say I was famous in Cape Verde, because everybody knew me there. But I could not record, and I was not getting paid for what I was doing,” she says. She continued to sing, but mostly she cooked and cleaned her mother’s house.

In 1985, she contemplated performing again, and when an association of Cape Verdean women in Portugal offered to bring her to Lisbon, she accepted. She recorded some LPs and singles in Portugal and Holland.

Two years later, she met Jose da Silva, a Frenchman of Cape Verdean descent, now her producer for 13 years. They recorded their first album together in 1988, and she toured a little, including concerts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, home to large populations of Cape Verdean immigrants.

Evora and Da Silva’s fourth collaboration, 1992’s “Miss Perfumado,” became a huge hit in France, and the rest of Europe soon followed. Now she sells more records in France than Janet Jackson.

The new “Sao Vicente” is their eighth collaboration. The album features several guests, including Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso and two Cuban acts, Orquesta Aragon and pianist Chucho Valdes. American-roots favorite Bonnie Raitt also appears, singing a duet, “Crepuscular Solidao,” in Crioulo. Evora appreciates the favor, even though the two never met: Their parts were recorded thousands of miles apart.

“Sao Vicente” is similar in theme to 1999’s “Cafe Atlantico,” which presented Evora in more upbeat, Cuban-flavored musical settings. “That album showed Cape Verde as a little cafe in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with music coming from everywhere around the world,” says Da Silva. “On the new album, we made even more of a fusion with different styles of music. That’s why it’s not only a Cape Verdean album like ‘Miss Perfumado’ or ‘Cabo Verde.’ It’s more of an encounter between this music from Cape Verde and other tropical styles.”

When BMG France first imported Evora to the United States in 1995, publicity materials suggested that after three divorces, she had vowed never to marry again. Tres French, perhaps, but not true. She has never married, period. “Maybe they said that because I had three different children from three different fathers,” she says with a shrug.

“The fact that I sing about love doesn’t have anything to do with my emotional life. I think I didn’t have a husband because in Cape Verde, when you have a husband, you have a child, two children, three children. Then sometimes if the man wants, he just leaves you and you have to have another man to help you, because you cannot raise those children alone. It’s hard to live like that,” she says. “That doesn’t happen to everybody, but it’s common in Cape Verde. That’s why in Cape Verde, women are always fighting for themselves and for their children.”

She lights another cigarette. “Women in Cape Verde are very strong, and we have a fighting spirit.”

A Diva Who Feels Comfortable in Sandals

Sitting in BMG’s Times Square offices, Evora is dressed in a sleeveless black-and-silver dress covered by a sheer, beaded jacket, from Paris. Her hair is cropped short, her long fingernails lacquered mahogany.

Despite her famous nickname, “the barefoot diva” (her first album with Da Silva was titled “La Diva aux Pieds Nus”), she’s wearing black sandals. When she’s back home in Cape Verde--and whenever she performs onstage--she doesn’t wear shoes. “People used to say that I did that in solidarity with the hungry people and all the poor people of the world, but that’s not true,” she says. “In Cape Verde, lots of people are like me. They just don’t like to wear shoes.”

Evora has an earthy sexiness that Paule Micallef-Thonon, director of international development for BMG France, refers to as “a maternal sensuality.” She is beautiful, though not by MTV’s youth-obsessed, body-sculpted standards. Her beauty has something to do with the way she shyly averts her eyes even when she’s looking at you. It’s in the softness of her apple-shaped cheeks, and the way she holds her fingers just so as she smokes her fourth cigarette in half an hour. It’s in her understated dignity, when, looking out the window, she explains: “I’m just a simple person. I’m not hard to understand.”

She is grateful when her talent is recognized, and she talks wistfully about the four Grammys that got away. “I don’t know if one day I’m going to win a Grammy, since I have been nominated four times, and until now that was not possible,” she says. “If that would be possible, I would be very happy about that.”

But the people she works with say she isn’t impressed by celebrity. “Many people of some renown are moved by Cesaria’s voice, and it’s interesting to watch how she reacts,” says Joe Killian, her North American manager. “Madonna asked her to sing at her wedding. . . . Willem Dafoe comes backstage, or Ed Bradley or David Byrne. And she’s not impressed--it doesn’t faze her one way or another. She just kind of takes it all in.”

Evora’s son and daughter have grown up now, and her daughter has two children of her own. Her grandson, 17, is a huge hip-hop fan. “That music makes confusion in my head,” she says, “but I do like the way that they move when they are dancing on television.”

Micallef-Thonon says the label’s promotional strategy for Evora relies heavily on touring. “We make her work quite hard,” she says. “But she’s so grateful to be given this chance to do all of this and she doesn’t falter. She’s a woman who has had a lot of hard times in her life.”

Asked about the hardships she’s endured, Evora replies in the most general way. “I was born in a poor country. I was poor, but I lived all my life with what I had. I didn’t spend more than I had. Cape Verde is not the only place where there are poor people.”

Of course, Evora is no longer poor. “Now I work, and I see the results of my work, so I have some money,” she says. “But I’m still the same person that I was before. I still have the same simple life. I still have the same friends.”

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Cesaria Evora performs Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., L.A. $1 to $75. (323) 850-2000. (Brazilian singer Bebel Gilberto also performs.)