01 A cloth in a bag
It was not always quite like this. In its older form, batuku began with an introduction on the cimboa, a stringed instrument that supplied the underlying musical line. Its use is now extinct: what remained was the voice and the cloth.
It is worth saying without romanticism: this is not an aesthetic choice. It is what could be had. And the result, measured in musical terms, is more complex than most of what gets played with an orchestra.
02 Three over two
Here is the fact that makes this article exist. Batuku is the only polyrhythmic Cape Verdean musical genre. Analysed precisely, what you hear is a three-beat rhythm laid over a two-beat rhythm, at an andante tempo of around 112 beats per minute, in 6/8 or 3/4.
In practice that means one performer executes the polyrhythmic strike while the others hold the two-beat strike, clapping or hitting the cloth. Two different rhythmic grids sounding at once over the same pulse.
Traditionally batuku is purely melodic: it is sung, with no harmonic accompaniment. All the complexity lives in the rhythm and in the relationship between the voices.
03 A crescendo in two movements
The piece is organised as an orchestral crescendo and has two movements, each with its own Creole name. The first is called galion: the lead singer, the kantadera proféta, sings a verse that the others — the kantaderas di kunpanha — repeat immediately in unison, in a response called ronca baxon.
Those verses, improvised, are called finason, and they cover everything: praise of particular people, social criticism, everyday scenes. Which is to say, the words are not fixed in advance and may refer to whatever is happening in the room that night.
The second movement is called txabéta and is the climax: all the performers execute the same polyrhythmic strike at once and all sing the same verse in unison, working as a refrain. The dance that goes with it is called da ku tornu, a hip movement managed through a quick flexion of the knees.
04 Where to hear it
This genre came close to disappearing. It was at one point forbidden in urban centres and, from the 1950s on, it was a dying form. The revival came in the nineties, with young composers who set about researching and reviving it; today some write it with harmonic accompaniment and a verse-and-refrain structure, closer to the archipelago's other genres.
For the traveller that has a practical consequence. What plays on the radio and in bars may be either version, and they are not the same thing. The traditional form — no harmony, just voices and cloth, with the two movements — is the one to look for, and it turns up in music venues in Praia and at parties in the island's interior.
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And one final clarification, because the two get confused constantly. The Cape Verdean music that travelled the world is morna, and morna is not this: it comes chiefly from other islands, in another metre and another character. Batuku is from Santiago, it is polyrhythmic, it is sung in Creole and it is played on a cloth. If you come to Praia and only hear morna, you have left without hearing the music of the place you were in.
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