Pretaluz is the world-wide debut of Waldemar Bastos. Recorded in New York with Angolan and Portuguese musicians, it was produced by noted downtown artist and Luso-savant Arto Lindsay. An intuitive musician, Waldemar belongs to a new generation of African artists — urbane, cosmopolitan, and able to draw from wealth of influences, local and not so near, to create indelible songs. These are his notes about Pretaluz. This album, the first that I have recorded in the United States, gives a sense of the breadth and variety of my musical projects, although, as is always the case with what I compose and perform, its backbone is the music of Angola. “Sofrimento” [“Suffering”] is a lament, inflected with the vocal style of the Portuguese fado, for the devastation caused by the war. “Rainha Ginga” [“Queen Ginga”], a song of praise for the legendary Bakongo queen who led the resistance against the early Portuguese colonialists, it also partakes of the tradition of the Portuguese medieval troubadours and expresses one of the most universal themes of all song and poetry: praise of an absent and beautiful beloved. “Muxima” [“Heart”] a traditional Kimbundu folksong, is dedicated to Our Lady of Muxima, Senhora d’Santana. “Kuribôta” [“Evil Tongue”] is a song about jealousy and envy, which throughout the history of mankind have blocked our natural development. “Morro do Kussava” [“Mount Kussava”] describes a hill overlooking the city of Nova Lisboa in southern Angola where some of the most ferocious fighting took place during the civil war. One used to approach the city from this hill and see the lights of the city shimmering at night from a distance of twenty kilometers. Now, all that remains of that beautiful sight is darkness. As the song implies, this landscape reminds me that, like the weapons that destroyed the lights of Nova Lisboa, we are everyday becoming more like machines, that there is such a profound lack of love between people and, above all, that beauty once existed in my country. If it once existed, however, I believe it must return. This song, like all of my music, is an inducement to reflect on beauty and positive things. “Minha Família” [“My Family”] offers a message of all-embracing love, expressing my belief that my family is not only the one that nurtured me in Africa growing up, and the nation of Angola — which have both suffered so much from interminable war — but also the global family I have come to know as a result of being an artist. “Menina” [“Girl”] represents a more urban contemporary sound, reminiscent of Zairean zouk music and containing a hint of Brazilian samba, but nonetheless recognizably Angolan. “Querida Angola” [“Beloved Angola”] is a semba, a folk musical and dance form that provided the rhythmic base for the Brazilian samba and Afro-Cuban music. The song is at once a plea for less extremism and a love song to my native land, since Angola is, after all, feminine, and a woman is something a man should respect, cherish and celebrate. “Kanguru” [“Kangaroo”] I used the metaphor of the kangaroo — brothers in struggle must unite and think about the whole, not just their individual interests. Leap past our differences like the kangaroo.