In 2010, Lura wrote Moda Bô for Cesaria Evora and they recorded the song together. It was featured on the album Best Of Lura released the same year and was widely aired on the radio. The two artists sang together a few more times, especially at the Grand Rex in Paris on April 29 & 30, 2011. Like all Cape Verdean artists, Lura was deeply distressed when Cesaria passed away eight months later on December 17. As a tribute to the departed legend, she released the song Nós Diva on YouTube and then decided to take a little time out. Putting the album she was planning on hold, she left her cherished Lisbon for a while and moved to Praia, the capital of Cape Verde on the island of Santiago, where music plays a very special role.
Santiago’s batuque, funana and tabanka beats were created by African slaves who had escaped the coercion of the colony’s masters and gone to live as Maroons in the island’s high mountains. The first single from Herança (Heritage), Lura’s new album (due for release in October 2015), is Maria di Lida. It was written by Jorge Tavares Silva, whose work is very popular among the Badiu people from the center of the island but had never been recorded before. Pure, beat-based funana, the song is ideally suited to live performance and will certainly be an iconic number in the new repertoire that Lura will be presenting at European venues in 2016.
