Elida Almeida

Born in 1993 in Pedra Badejo on Santiago Island, Cape Verde, Elida Almeida grew up in a mountain village without electricity, where the radio and church singing nourished her earliest musical impulses. As a teenager she sang at services, later appeared on a local radio station, wrote her first songs and honed a style drawing from funaná and batuque as much as from morna and coladeira. Spotted by producer José da Silva—based in France and already involved in the Cape Verdean scene—she began performing in bars and at local concerts before being invited to Portugal and France in 2014. Her first album, Ora doci, Ora margos, was released in Cape Verde in 2014 and internationally in 2015, its sound shaped by Hernani Almeida’s guitar and the rhythm section of Nelly Cruz, Diego Gomes and Magik Santiago. In 2015 she was noticed at the Festival Musiques Métisses in Angoulême, then played dates in Paris and the United States, while also building a regular presence on African stages from FEMUA in Abidjan to the JazzKif festival in Kinshasa. That year she won an RFI prize awarded by a jury chaired by Oumou Sangaré. She followed with the album Kebrada in 2017, where Santiago’s traditional rhythms mingle with contemporary pop and Afro influences. Between airy ballads and more danceable tracks, Elida Almeida’s music remains centered on the Creole language, a narrative connection to Cape Verdean daily life, and songwriting that circulates stories of migration, attachment to the island and women’s trajectories.