Mariza at the Blue Note Festival in Belgium last year.

Rhythm and Blues, Portuguese Style

What happens to a little girl who grows up listening to taxi drivers and peddlers sing the blues in bars? She might just turn into one of Europe's most acclaimed singers.
At least that's the case for the platinum-haired singer Mariza - she's reinventing Portugal's nearly 200-year-old traditional music, fado.

Mariza began to sing fado before she learned how to read.

Fado is sometimes referred to as Portuguese blues music, but it's unlike any Muddy Waters tune you've ever heard. It's permeated with sadness and longing, tied to the traditional folk songs of 19th-century sailors. The music is often described in Portuguese as saudade, a word with no definite English translation, which represents a kind of longing and conveys a complex blend of nostalgia, sadness, pain, happiness, and love - emotions otherwise only experienced at Cher concerts.

Fado has always been a part of 32-year-old Mariza's life. She was born in Mozambique but moved to Mouraria, a traditional neighborhood of Lisbon, Portugal, at age three. There, her parents owned a restaurant and fado house where she heard the soulful songs performed every weekend by locals. She began to sing fado when she was five, even before she learned how to read; her father drew pictures to illustrate the words for her.

Fado is a style of music that could have easily been phased out with the 1999 death of Amália Rodrigues, a singer known as the Queen of the Fado. In the age of sugarcoated pop hits, you wouldn't expect a singer with the soul of Billie Holiday and the lyrical tastes of Leonard Cohen to be packing concert halls in country after country. Yet, according to everyone from the great Portuguese Nuno Nazareth Fernandes, one of Portugal's greatest composers, to Billboard Magazine, Mariza has reinvented the genre. Where fado singers are traditionally accompanied by a classical guitar, a stand-up bass and a Portuguese guitar - a twelve-stringed national instrument that resembles a mandolin - Mariza's dynamic voice is often backed by a full string orchestra, an accordion, and sometimes only by piano.

After the release of her first album, Fado Em Mim (appropriately translated as Fado in Me) in 2001, Mariza was thrust on to the international scene, bringing tears to sold-out audiences in nearly every continent. She'll be touring this summer to celebrate her recent Globo de Ouro award (sort of like the Portuguese Grammys) for her latest album, Transparente. Her only two U.S. appearances will be in LA, which just might give people a reason to take a road trip.

Just remember to pack a hanky.

Posted on June 19, 2006