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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the impact of Orlando Pantera's music and lyrics on the integration of Afro and popular expressions into contemporary styles and trends in Cape Verdean music.

Paper long abstract:

In 2000 I made a film (More Soul) with Cape Verdean musician and composer Orlando Pantera. In 2024, with fieldwork done in Santiago Island, I explored the influences of his music on the contemporary artistic scene using a multimodal anthropological approach, including traditional forms of visual anthropology while simultaneously engage the variety of media forms that exist today. Orlando Pantera (1967-2001) died at the age of 33, without recording any album of his own. My collaborative research and film rescues him from a certain anonymity, through a creative and experimental use of sound, image and written archives, unpublished recordings, archival material from artistic residencies in the 1980s, all this articulated with a journey, today, to the intricacies of the Cape Verdean "soul" that Pantera represents. As Cidra (2022:01) states, “his compositions negotiate the inclusion of historically silenced or subaltern histories, cultural practices, and experiences of being Cape Verdean within the framework of a hegemonic Creole national narrative”. He is considered today as the most influential of a new generation of musicians, setting his music and his use of an archaic creole on on nostalgic roots and rurality by . He unearthed traditional genres from the island of Santiago, coming back from colonial African slaves, forgotten by post-independence generations and, without reproducing them, created his own style, admired by both established and young people. Inspired by videoclips and photographs from the 80's and 90's, this multimodal research discusses ways of doing visual, sensorial and musical ethnography.

Cidra, R. (2022). Orlando Pantera e a performance da história. Lusotopie, XXI(1), 1-19. https://journals.openedition.org/lusotopie/4939