Mayra Andrade: Beats out a rhythm

Closing her eyes and arching her neck backwards, the young Cape Verdean singer Mayra Andrade brings her palms to her collar bone and begins to beat out a rhythm from her home islands off the West Coast of Africa.

The "batuque" beat she is tapping into comes from a Cape Verdean dance - possibly used to promote bridal fertility - that was condemned as un-Christian by the Portuguese colonists.

Today the hypnotic polyrhythm has been reborn and reinterpreted in the now independent nation where 70% of the population are of mixed race and generations of emigration mean that women far outnumber men.

Tonight's polite and exclusively white audience at the Besancon musical festival in Eastern France close their eyes with Mayra Andrade, nod their heads and tune in as her lovely voice washes over them.

She sings songs of brave women calling fishermen in from the rough waves of the Atlantic, of love and loss and time passing in weathered isolation. There's a guttural oomph that reminds me of 1970s jazz singer Marlena Shaw.