Febri Funaná

For most of its history funaná was treated as music not fit for the capital. Built on the diatonic accordion, called gaita, and the ferrinho, a metal strip scraped with a knife, it came from the rural interior of Santiago island and from the poorer classes, and at one point performing it in Praia was even forbidden. In the city, morna was the music of prestige. Early efforts to revive funaná after independence in 1975 mostly failed, because, as one account puts it, the style could not get away from coladeira. Bulimundo changed that. The band was founded in Pedra Badejo in April 1978 by Carlos Alberto Martins, known as Katchás, and was named after the backyard where it first rehearsed. Katchás went back to the source in inner Santiago and used what he knew of jazz and classical music to reinvent funaná for electric guitar, bass, drum kit and keyboards, folding in batuque, tabanka and morna as well. Audiences on other islands were puzzled at first; one member recalled that people in São Vicente thought the band was playing coladeira wrong. Their breakthrough came at the Praia-80 festival in March 1980. Over the following years Bulimundo carried funaná to every island in Cape Verde and beyond, and Febri Funaná, from that early run of records, belongs to the moment when an accordion music once kept out of town became a national sound. Katchás died in a road accident in 1988, but the style he electrified is now played and loved across the whole archipelago.