The Cape Verdean Elida Almeida returns with a fourth album, Gerasonobu, in which she confirms her status as a leader of the new generation of musicians in Cape Verde. At 27, Elida Almeida already stands, with her honey smile and solar energy, as youthful as she is mature, as the figurehead of the new musical generation of Cape Verde. She wears this status like a banner and places it on the front of her new album, titled Gerasonobu (“New generation” in Cape Verdean Creole). For, with other fellow musicians, the young woman, whose roots are planted on the island of Santiago, is helping to blow apart the codes of Cape Verdean music: this tradition illuminated by the tutelary figure of Cesária Evora, jealously watched over by so-called “experts,” who growl as soon as one takes a (dance) step outside orthodoxy. Yet, Elida protests, “Even Cesária’s creations stand apart from ‘traditional’ pieces. The music of my archipelago of sailors, open to all winds, permeable to all influences, all mixtures, is defined precisely by its constant evolution...” Thus, unlike her last album Kebrada, which takes its name from her native village and is rooted in the tiny, electricity-free patch of land where she grew up, today she travels the world, antennas out, to nourish her newly drawn paths. In her luggage? The Cape Verdean songs that lulled her early years, on the radio. The wandering tracks of Gerasonobu were thus composed in all corners of the planet, while on tour, in the half-awake dream of an airplane journey, in Lisbon where she lives, or even in Abidjan... “Each time, my creations, with a Cape Verdean heart, were infused with the vibrations, the music of the territories in which I wrote them,” she smiles. And to give her songs a more “urban” texture, Elida surrounded herself with her faithful accomplice, the multi-instrumentalist and Cape Verdean producer Hernani Almeida, as well as DJ, producer and musician Blinky Bill, hero of Kenya’s new guard.