Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The title of Ayom’s new album, the follow-up to 2020’s widely praised debut, is unpromising. No need to worry, insists the band’s lead singer Jabu Morales. “Saliva is on everyone’s lips . . . It is universal and unites where languages divide.” Literally so, in fact: the word is the same in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, in keeping with the band’s mission to explore the music of the Black Atlantic, from Morales’s native Brazil to her adopted home of Barcelona and back again via Cape Verde. The conceit is richer than that: the album falls into three sections. The Sa is for sagrada, three songs about the sacred and the holy, and Ayom’s collective fascination with Candomblé, the syncretic religion that maps Catholic saints on to African orishas. The opening “Oxalá, Promessa do Migrante” celebrates the deity of migration, strings waving gently around Morales’s saudade-soaked singing. The wateriness is also strong in “Odê a Oxum”, Oxum being the orisha of fresh water and by extension beauty, fertility and growth: the song builds through sawing cello and a swaying maracatu section, the singing increasingly operatic. © The Li is for liberdade, for life, freedom and love. Juliana Linhares joins in the Carnival-infused “Eu Me Quero Mais”, rich with Tropicália flourishes, pumping brass and a high-speed rap. Impossibly fast accordion licks from Alberto Becucci are to the fore on “Fuzué Funana”.And Va is for valentia, songs of courage. The Angolan semba singer Paulo Flores joins Morales on “Kikola N’goma”, amid high chiming guitars over squelches of synthesiser from the record’s producer, Guilherme Kastrup, to probe the faultlines of Brazil’s official national story about colonisation. “Canto de Negro” is underpinned — or undermined — by keyboard lines that seem to slip downhill as they are being played. The album ends with a standalone coda in the form of “Io Sono Il Vento”. The 1950s Italian hit was originally by Mina, the Tigress of Cremona, but in this version Morales is joined by Portuguese Eurovision-winner Salvador Sobral.★★★★☆‘SaLiVa’ is released by Ayom/Believe
