In Songs for Cabo Verde, Susan Hurley-Glowa offers an accessibly written portrait of the Cabo Verdean musician Norberto Tavares (1956–2010), capturing the myriad facets of his personality and artistry. Through her writing, Tavares emerges as a musical innovator dedicated to amplifying the long-dismissed sound worlds of his native Santiago Island. Hurley-Glowa portrays him with nuance, simultaneously emphasizing his introversion and his interest in the public good. Intended as a “critical biography” (Hurley-Glowa 2021:10), Songs for Cabo Verde uses Tavares’s life and lyrics to illuminate the broader history of Cabo Verde’s decolonization and postcolonial aftermath. Throughout the book, Hurley-Glowa shows how Tavares’s poetry negotiates the ethical and social questions undergirding these seismic moments of transition. She attends assiduously to Tavares’s craft, documenting his precision as a composer, lyricist, producer, vocalist, and keyboardist while also grounding his stylistic interventions in historical perspective. Hurley-Glowa’s depiction gains its vigour not only from her ethnomusicological expertise, but also from her 20-year friendship and musical rapport with Tavares, which allows her to render him both tenderly and fully.

It becomes evident in the Introduction that Hurley-Glowa is not interested in using Tavares’s story to grind a theoretical axe. Instead, the chapter explains her own relationship with Tavares and provides a series of lenses through which his life might best be understood: as entangled in a transnational history of Cabo Verdean decolonization, as exemplifying the technological and aesthetic exchanges that characterize twentieth-century Black Atlantic musicianship, and as providing evidence of music’s political possibilities. Chapter Two offers a sharp overview of Cabo Verde’s musical and dance traditions, elaborating the multiplicity of Cabo Verdean sound-worlds. Here, Hurley-Glowa describes the archipelago’s wide-ranging palette of genres, including the lilting, melancholic morna, the polyrhythmic, percussive batuku, and the energetic, accordion-driven funaná. While this chapter’s foray into historical background may feel like a detour from the biographical thrust of the book, it provides crucial context for readers without a strong knowledge of Cabo Verde.

The rest of the book follows the trajectory of Tavares’s life. Chapter One documents his early years in the historically revolutionary city of Assomada, where both the region’s rural Santiaguense culture and the omnipresence of Portuguese repression left a large imprint on his person. He would go on to compose with influence from his native island’s musical genres, and to write lyrics in favour of Cabo Verde’s national unity and decolonial sovereignty. In Chapters Three and Four, Tavares emerges as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and vocalist in Portugal as the allied Bissau-Guinean and Cabo Verdean independence struggle reaches its conclusion. Here, Hurley-Glowa argues that Tavares found his musical voice and “social conscience” (2021:117) when working with the band Black Power. She further contends that his interest in promoting musical forms repressed under colonialism parallels the cultural ideologies of Cabo Verdean revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral. Chapters Five and Six portray Tavares’s transition to a career in New England, where his leadership of Tropical Power brought Santiaguense music to new diasporic audiences while his musical messages continued to impact the archipelago from afar. Chapter Six examines Tavares’s New Bedford-based studio, his reimagination of the Santiaguense funaná genre, and his meticulous compositional process. The tail end of Tavares’s life is depicted in Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine. While Tavares was opposed to partisanship, the anti-authoritarian streak in his lyrics—formerly understood as advocating against Portugal’s imperial abuses—seemed ripe for political interpretation as the country democratized in the early ‘90s. The revolutionary party now faced a liberal competitor who critiqued its tendencies towards censorship, and Tavares used a 1990 tour in the islands to express support of democratic governance. Yet, just as his philosophical influence cemented in the islands, Cabo Verdean New Englanders’ tastes shifted towards zouk-style dance music, and Tavares’s career and health both suffered. Hurley-Glowa uses the Epilogue to speak to Tavares’s legacy, noting the many charitable musical projects initiated in his name and insisting that his voice continues to echo in Cabo Verdean repertoire and politics.

The book’s greatest contribution to Cabo Verdean music studies and to ethnomusicology as a whole is in its highlighting of Tavares specifically. As a Cabo Verdean of historically marginalized and racialized Santiaguense heritage and as a diaspora-based musician, Tavares might easily have been relegated to the periphery of Cabo Verdean music studies. In this respect, Hurley-Glowa builds upon previous scholarship discussing how Cabo Verdean / Americans have shaped the archipelago’s decolonial politics (Pilgrim Reference Pilgrim2015) and musical style (Baptista Reference Baptista2023), and adds to current academic conversations around Cabo Verdean racialization in both the archipelago (Hubbard Reference Hubbard2011; Cidra Reference Cidra2018) and diaspora (Halter Reference Halter1993; Gibau Reference Gibau2005; Saucier Reference Saucier2015). While she steadily refuses hagiography—a tempting tendency when writing about a friend—her understandable desire to share Tavares’s life and work in its completeness weights the book a bit heavily towards deep musical analysis for the casual reader. Even so, the biography is as contextual as it is reflexive, and interweaves several critical issues: how patriarchy operates in the Cabo Verdean context, how colonialism’s shadows linger over its decolonized society, and how we can continue to reform historic power differentials between ethnographer and interlocutor. In this vein, Hurley-Glowa’s methodology is radically transparent and textures the work. The book’s biographical narrative is juxtaposed with a collage of her sources, including ethnographic vignettes, interview excerpts, translated lyrics, and musical transcriptions. Audio examples are available on Hurley-Glowa’s YouTube playlist, and they make for rich accompaniment to her analysis. Her interspersed and multimedia approach raises questions around the future of the ethnomusicological monograph, including both the possibilities and limitations of the print format in showcasing layered methodologies, polyvocality, and nonlinearity.

In all, Songs for Cabo Verde proposes a compelling ethnomusicological approach to the artist biography and has chosen its subject well in the distinctive Norberto Tavares. Hurley-Glowa has produced an informative research resource for music scholars, particularly those interested in the Lusophone world, political decolonization, and the Black Atlantic. It is admirable that she also manages to offer a clearly written life narrative in which the friends and family of Tavares can share.