MARIO LUCIO is one of the most recognizable figures of Cape Verde as a musician, a singer-songwriter, and one of the country’s foremost and leading composers of all time. An internationally acclaimed writer and author of "Manifesto a Criolização”, the most current work on the phenomenon of Creolization in the world.
Singer, guitarist, composer, poet, writer, thinker and even former Minister of Culture: Mario Lucio is all these things and more for Cape Verdeans. A champion of creolization, the artist's work is a sensitive and passionate tribute to the cross-fertilization that has shaped his country's culture.
Mario Lucio’s signature songs and arrangements are found in an array of albums and songs most of which were interpreted and recorded by the late Cesária Évora and country’s emerging and established singers as well as artists as far afield as Brazil, France and Italy.
50 years after the independence of Cape Verde and the other ex-Portuguese colonies, Mario Lucio releases an album, ‘Independance’, celebrating this great moment of change in Lusophone Africa.
The title of his seventh opus, ‘Independance’, includes “dance”, a play on words referring to the return of previously forbidden folk dances and the opening up of the country to dance music from Angola, Congo, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal…
A resolutely festive album, in which Mario takes pleasure in recalling that era of his childhood, filled with joy and music.
PRESS
"Following in the footsteps of Edouard Glissant, his music is all-World, part of a dynamic that ignores victim identity."
Marianne
“The artist pays a sensitive and passionate tribute to the cross-fertilisation that has shaped his country's culture.”
Cap Magellan
“Emotions seep into the cracks of a soft, colourful language.”
Amina
“The man who has been dubbed the Bob Dylan or the Chico Buarque of Cape Verdean music echoes his humanist heart in his committed lyrics.”
Jazz Rhone Alpes
“There's something that carries in this music, which is always very melodic and absolutely luminous."
Froggy’s Delight
“An album which radiates purity”
Trouw (NL)
“What is striking is the fragility in Mario’s voice. It has a light tremolo, a bit hoarse, warmly convincing and simple. His vocals and the music radiate sympathy.”
Musicframe (NL)
“Mario Lucio's brilliant tenth album, [...] lyrics as inspired as they are inspiring”
Le Monde
“With infinite gentleness and graceful musicality [...].”
Télérama Sortir
“An album that is both personal and universal, in which he pays tribute to those who, from time immemorial, have taken the road of migration with their roots as their only luggage.”
RFI
“(...)Migrants appears to us as a litany dedicated to Humanity, its songs composing an almost liturgical whole that is magnified by the web of arrangements that bring together electric and acoustic guitars, woodwinds, percussion, synthesizers, choral voices, all to the benefit of the words that emanate from them.”
Ipsilon