The world of lusophone song is marked by the softened sibilance and nasal diphthongs of the Portuguese language. Waxing emotive about one's coração (heart) benefits from that ending glide that acts as an investment of feeling.

It works equally well in the music of the European mother country or her former colonies: Brazil; Angola, in southwest Africa; or the tiny South Atlantic island nation of Cape Verde.

Tavares' singular music has elements of all these locales, though she favors her Cape Verdean roots. (Her parents were immigrants from the islands.) Above all, she draws from the Afro-Portuguese communities of cosmopolitan Lisbon.

Although half of Tavares' band is of Cape Verdean origin, and she sometimes sings in the islands' Portuguese-infused Crioulo language - which she explored in her previous album, Balancê - she is not, as is sometimes reported, a C.V. native. She made that clear when she introduced her third song, "Lisboa Kuya," a gorgeous paean to her hometown, Lisbon: "it's the capital city of Portugal . . . where I was born and raised . . . where I found my musical family . . . where I draw all my inspiration from."

But Tavares' synthesis transcends Portuguese fado as much as the Cape Verdean morna style made famous by the great "Barefoot Diva," Cesária Évora. Friday, Tavares performed plenty of dance-happy numbers, but she also sang the reflective "Ponto de Luz" ("Point of Light"), the single off her 2009 album Xinti ("Feel It"). It's a meditation on the magic of music. Her backing band included bass, two percussionists, and the essential contributions of Jon Luz on electric guitar and the ukelelelike cavaquinho.

The highlight was "Fundi Ku Mi" ("Be One With Me"), a riveting tune of sparse guitar that took wing on the soaring instrument that is Tavares' clear, deeply affecting voice.