Legendary genre-crossing vocal-and-guitar music from Angola

Born on the border of Angola and Congo in 1954, Waldemar Bastos started singing and making music at an early age. "Five centuries of colonization meant that when I was growing up I heard many songs from many different cultures," he explains. As well as the African sounds he heard a lot of Brazilian music; the Beatles, Nat King Cole, the Bee Gees and Carlos Santana as early non-African influences. Waldemar was detained and imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial secret police without reason. After Angola eventually achieved its independence in 1975, bloody civil war engulfed the country. Waldemar reluctantly concluded that this was not a climate in which musicians could develop and grow. He ended up in Brazil, where he recorded the landmark album "Estamos Juntos" in 1982. He later worked with David Byrne at Luaka Bop in New York, and his latest album, "Renascence," continues the unclassifiable mix of styles that has characterized his music. Building bridges with music as a universal language, Waldemar Bastos combines African heritage with contemporary Western sounds. Waldemar will be backed by Rui Meira (classical guitar), Miguel Trovoada (drums and vocals), and Mitchell Long (acoustic guitar and backing vocalist) a A FREE show— sponsored by the American Portuguese Studies Association Conference and the University of Michigan. https://theark.org/shows-events/2018/oct/20/waldemar-bastos