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Sara Tavares weaves her sound through a tapestry lush with light jazz, funk and Afro-European grooves. Singing in a mix of Portuguese, Cape Verdean Crioulo and English, Tavares voice ranges from a breathy Atlantic breeze to a thin silver line connecting poly-rhythmic beats.

Balancê plays like a tropical ode to love, and to the now. The title track, derived from a Portuguese word to describe music that “swings,” is like riding a catamaran in an easy Mediterranean sea. To listen to the song Lisboa Kuya, as the liner notes say, is “To walk Lisbon’s streets on a late afternoon; taste its corners, secrets made out of light . . . .”

Tavares, a Lisbon native born to second-generation Cape Verdean immigrants, was a veritable music factory in the making of this album. She wrote or co-wrote all the songs but one (Dam Bô, by Hernani Almeida), arranged all the tracks and produced the album, which was recorded in Lisbon’s Xangrilá Studios. She’s a virtual one-woman band, singing not only lead and backing vocals, but playing guitars, tambourine, triangles, and a flurry of other percussion. She’s accompanied by a handful of other musicians playing a colorful array of guitars, congas, marimbas, rainsticks, mandolins and several instruments I can’t pronounce.

The musical strains fuse into a free-spirited samba-like dance that owes nothing to rules, but doesn’t go too far out of its way to break them, either. “I want to be a part of a movement like the African Americans were, like the African Brazilians were,” says Tavares. “It will be a long time before the people from my generation do not have to choose between being African or European. I think you shouldn’t have to choose. You should just be there. Celebrate that. Be that!”

The album delivers on Tavares’ metisse promise. Poka Terra, a duet with Melo D, uses a hypnotic syncopation to mimic a train-like pulse, while Planeta Sukri, with Boy Gê Medes, hums with a coladeira rhythm (think Cesaria Evora), singing of a sugar planet “where everything that envelopes us is sweet.”

But Balancê does not shy away from unabashed pronouncements of love. Ess Amor, a softer ballad, sings of “that love which warms the chest to almost the burning point,” spiced with cobblestone hints of streetcorner accordion by Artur Fernandes. “Guisa” is a lonely call, a prayer to the wind, “to love to the point of disappearing,” while “Amor É” reads like a psalm: “Love is everything, love is nothing, love is wings, love is the moment.” An attitude which seems to describe Tavares’ stance toward language itself: it’s everything, nothing, all embracing, unimportant except for what it can give us in the now.

The album closes with De Nua, a duet with Ana Moura, Fado-flavored vocals draped over sparse, insistent percussion: “To shout goodbye with the voice of silence, to dress myself in nudity and fly wingless, hovering naked . . . yours. From Love. Amen.” The perfect cap to a rich, vibrant album.