Click here to listen to Mayra Andrade

Click here to listen to Cesaria Evora

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.

The singer-songwriter tipped as heir apparent to Evora – now nearing 70 – is Mayra Andrade. Born in Cuba to Cape Verdean parents (her father fought in Cape Verde’s war of independence, in which Castro’s Cuba was an ally), she grew up in Senegal, Angola and Germany, and has lived since 2003 in Paris. Yet, at just 23, she is one of a new generation imbuing Cape Verdean roots with an individual style. Less world-weary and smokily rasping than Evora’s, her voice is playful and caressing without being cloyingly sweet. Her debut recording, Navega, was a Sunday Times album of 2007.

Supporting Angélique Kidjo at London’s Barbican last autumn, in only her second UK gig, she performed with a subtlety and drama that left a spring in the step and a lump in the throat, accompanying herself at times on acoustic guitar, or scraping time on the ferrigno, a metal percussion instrument. She returns to headline at the Barbican tonight and is shortlisted for best newcomer in the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards, to be announced on April 10.

Apart from a song in French, her album is sung in Kriolu, a meld of old-style Portuguese and West African languages, “because it’s in Cape Verdean style”. But her musicians, including the four Brazilians she tours with, are drawn from Paris’s cosmopolitan scene. Her acoustic sound has elements of jazz, samba, bossa nova and French chanson.

“I’m not interested in analysing my influences; they come out in an unconscious way,” Andrade says. We are in a central London cafe attached to her record label, Stern’s.

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.”

Her album includes Dimo-kransa, the Kriolu poet Kaka Bar-boza’s critique of Cape Verde’s chaotic multiparty democracy of the 1990s, and Nhela Spencer’s soulful lament about the drive to leave in search of a better break. Her own compositions are inspired by the lives of others, from Mana, about a girl who regrets leaving for the city to find a husband, to Nha Sibitchi (My Jet-Black Pearl), invoking the necklace traditionally worn to ward off the evil eye.

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.

Though Andrade lived abroad from the age of six to 15, after her parents divorced and her mother married a diplomat, she spent at least two months a year at home. “My mother’s husband was the ambassador, so we were representing Cape Verde. It’s not the same when you go to look for work.” Her cousin played jazz guitar and samba, and her first musical loves were the Bahian siblings Maria Bethania and Caetano Veloso. She took up vocal training in Paris at 17, after winning gold in a singing competition in Canada.

While morna, Cape Verde’s mid-Atlantic blues, is the “queen rhythm, common to all the islands”, and its bouncy derivative, coladeira, is widespread, a less Portuguese-inflected sound developed in the farmlands of Santiago island, her mother’s birthplace. She heard women sing the trance-like batuku, clapping the rhythm on a rolled-up cloth as others danced. Like the funana, “It is the most African expression of our culture,” she says. “It has existed since slavery, and was forbidden in colonial times. It is very sensual.” Its climax is the finaçon, an improvised social critique, like a calypso, which is often intended to lob a message to those in power.

While Evora “opened doors for us”, Andrade says, mornaand coladeira“were the music of the salon, music for a ‘good girl’ to sing. It was more European, so it was not forbidden” – unlike African drumming and speaking Kriolu in schools. Even after independence from Portugal in 1975, “ batukuand funanawere thought of as music for the back of the house, for farmers”. One of Andrade’s aims is to “give our African side the place it deserves”.

A key influence was the composer Orlando Pantera, a pioneer of the neo- batukujust catching on in the clubs of Praia, the capital, when he died of pancreatitis in 2001, aged 33. “In our culture they like traditional music to be played just so, but Orlando had the courage to do what I expected to do one day: use our roots to do something new.” They became friends as Andrade was starting to perform, aged 15. “He treated me like a sister, telling me to keep on and to try to be natural. His death was one of the worst pains for me. Singing his songs is a way to keep him alive.”

In her title song, Navega (Upon the Waves), the waltz-cum-mazurka matches the rhythm of the waves with growing desperation as a fisherman’s wife waits for her husband to return. “The ocean is very important to us, as a bridge to the world and also a prison,” Andrade says. “Cape Verdean people need music to feel free.”

Mayra Andrade plays the Barbican, EC2, tonight; the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards take place at Dingwalls, NW1, on April 10

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