MayraAndrade.com

Mayra Andrade (born 1985 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cape Verdean singer who lives and records in Paris, France.
Andrade was born in Cuba but grew up in Senegal, Angola, and Germany. However, she spent around two months of the year in the Cape Verdean island of Santiago. The first song she remembers singing is "O Leãozinho" by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, whom she has cited as a musical influence. Andrade often performed as a teenager and won the 2001 Jeux de la Francophonie songwriting contest at 16, beginning voice lessons in Paris at 17. During this time, she also met the composer Orlando Pantera and began collaborating with him. Andrade then began to perform in various Portuguese-speaking regions, including the Cape Verdean cities Mindelo and Praia as well as Lisbon. She won the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (English: German Record Critics Award) in 2007. She also won the Newcomer award at the BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music 2008.

Nobody in my family was musical, states Mayra.  My father was in the military – which is how I came to be born in Cuba. My mother had a difficult pregnancy and the medical care was better there, and because of the good relations between our countries he arranged for her to give birth there. But back in Cape Verde she made my cousin my godfather and he played guitar: jazz standards and Brazilian music. The first song I remember singing was Caetano Veloso's ""O Leãozinho" about the little lion. I'm an unconditional fan of Veloso. I love every thing he does."

Mayra Andrade may hail froma tiny African nation, but her music has fans taking notice fromCape Verde to Carnegie Hall.
Singer Mayra Andrade has always felt at home on a stage. As a child, she would perform for her family atop the dinner table. Alone, she stood in the middle of her bed and sang to her mirror. "Back then, they used to laugh and say, 'Oh, it's Mayra's fantasy moment,' " Andrade says, chuckling softly. "But now it is my real life."
Since those fantasy days, Andrade, who hails from Cape Verde, a tiny archipelago off Africa's western coast, has performed on stages across the globe, even headlining an event inside the famed Carnegie Hall. For those whose knowledge of Cape Verdean music begins and ends with the name Cesaria Evora (the Grammy-winning chanteuse), Andrade, 23, will be a welcome surprise.

Tiny, drought-prone Cape Verde has made music its biggest export. An archipelago of 10 volcanic islands 300 miles off Senegal, it has given the world not only the “barefoot diva”, Cesaria Evora, but a seemingly inexhaustible succession of vocal talent: Titina, Teofilo Chantre, Tcheka, and the Lisbon-born Sara Tavares, Lura and Carmen Souza.
Totally self-possessed and with a steady, open gaze, she searches for words in English, her fourth language after Portuguese, Kriolu and French. “I’m trying to make music that looks like me, and to make it as instinctively as possible.” 
Cape Verde’s only resources, Andrade stresses, are its people. The islands were a hub of the transatlantic slave trade, and just as most inhabitants have both Portuguese and African forebears, their music marries Iberian melodies with West African polyrhythms and centuries of Brazilian influence. There are twice as many Cape Verdeans in the diaspora as at home, where the population is 500,000 and women outnumber men. The pain of separation, from lovers and homeland, fuels the lyrics, as does the nostalgic yearning known as saudade. “This suffering feeds our music,” she says, yet is matched by a joie de vivre.

Andrade, who is headed back to the studio to cut a new CD for 2009, has her fair share of passport stamps. Born in Cuba, she divided her formative years among Angola, Germany, Portugal and Senegal. "We were in Lisbon for Christmas when I asked for my first guitar. I was 4," says Andrade, whose stepfather was a diplomat. She got the guitar, but she didn't have it for long. "We moved to Senegal when I was 6, and my mom didn't take the guitar, and I cried," Andrade says wistfully. "She told me it was broken, but it turns out that wasn't true. We just had too many things to move." The constant movement -- never staying in one place longer than three years -- meant that she often was making and losing friends and learning new customs and languages. The singer was also always listening to an ever-changing array of indigenous music. "It is why I like to explore so many different sounds," she says. She spent her teenage years in Cape Verde, where she started to sing locally. By 15, she was working with her country's leading producers and hearing her songs on the radio. Soon after, a vocal scholarship brought her to Paris, where she lives today. "I love living in France because you can find all sorts of music here," she says. "Rock, reggae, jazz, Brazilian, African, everything."