MATINEE – Curved Pitch presents: Taresa Fernandes – I Hope You Change (LP listening, film & conversation with Elisa Tavares)

Excited to host a matinee launch event for I Hope You Change by Taresa Fernandes on the Curved Pitched label, including a short film screening, full LP listening session with projected lyric translations, and a discussion with Elisa about Batuku. Free entry!

Batuku is one of Cape Verde’s oldest known cultural traditions — a communal art form where music, dance and oral storytelling converge. With roots in the music and dance practices brought to Santiago by enslaved Africans from West Africa in the 15th century, it developed over centuries into a distinct Cape Verdean tradition, carrying memory, resilience and collective experience across generations.

Performed mainly by women seated in a semi-circle, Batuku is built on layered hand percussion and the hypnotic polyrhythms of Txabéta, propelled by the dynamic Tornu dance. Sung in Cape Verdean Kriolu through call-and-response patterns, its songs speak of everyday life, migration, historical memory and the strength of community.

This release presents the remarkable artistry of Taresa Fernandes, one of today’s essential voices of Batuku. Raised in Santiago and later active in the neighborhoods of Praia, she has been instrumental in sustaining and revitalizing the tradition through her ensemble Taresa Fernandes Tradison di Terra. With a repertoire of hundreds of songs, her work preserves ancestral voices while opening them to universal themes of longing, resistance and joy.

“I listened, watched, and read. Beautiful work. It is refreshing to see Batuku remain so vital, rooted in a sharp, biting social critique and, above all, in the hands of women.” — Jean-Yves Loude, writer and producer of a six-CD series on Cape Verdean traditional music for Ocora-Radio France