Behind her is a small chamber group—the Sinfonietta de Lisboa, conducted by her musical director, Jaques Morelenbaum—as well as a traditional fado ensemble: Luis Guerreiro on Portuguese guitar (a 12-stringed instrument that sounds like a cross between oud and mandolin), Vasco Sousa on acoustic bass, Antonio Neto on Spanish guitar and percussionists Jose Saigueiro, Eduardo Saigueiro, Vicky and Joāo Pedro Ruela.

            In a long black dress that makes her look like a princess and sorceress at once, the blonde singer approaches the edge of the stage and begins singing “O Gente De Minha Terra,” a tune written by the late Amalia Rodriques, the undisputed queen of fado in her day.  The song is a salute to the Portuguese people, a ballad full of weeping guitars, aching sadness and national pride.  An electric charge goes through the crowd as they lean forward in their seats, eyes wide, drinking in every word as Mariza lifts her head and lets her emotions fly, her voice full of the anguish and restraint that makes fado so emotionally wrenching.  

“It was a rainy summer evening, a beautiful emotional night,” Mariza says, recalling the concert that’s now out on CD and DVD as Concerto em Lisboa.  “The tower was on the side of the stage, bathed in light.  It’s one of the most romantic places in Lisbon, a special place for us,” Mariza says that the Tower of Belém holds a deep personal meaning for her and her music.  “It’s the place where our explorers set sail for the New World, to find the future.  In the same way, I start off from the traditional roots of pure fado and while I respect the old traditions, I bring in my own sonorities to make it my fado, to take it into the future.”

            The plaza of the Tower had never been the site of a live concert before.  The mayor of Lisbon organized the event to pay tribute to Mariza’s success and to honor her as a world-renowned citizen of the city.  “Jaques was on stage conducting the special arrangements he’d written for that night,” the singer says.  “We had 25,000 people witnessing a concert of fado, which is not normal for Lisbon.  I saw older traditional fado purists, people my age, people younger than me, people who came from many different parts of the country.  It was a very emotional evening.  I was surprised how supportive the audience was.”

            “For a live recording, the sound quality on Concerto em Lisboa is amazing.  Mariza’s voice is strong, pure and expressive, while Morelenbaum’s expansive orchestral arrangements add even more drama to songs already heavy with heartrending power.  “Every note you hear me sing is live, no editing,” the singer says proudly.  “Some people retouch in the studio, I don’t.  If I make a mistake, I make a mistake.  Music is not perfect.  It’s the same in the studio.  I work with old analog equipment, machines with tubes in them.  You get a hotter sound for the voice and if you make a mistake, you have to admit that and go on.  What you see on the DVD is what happened that night.  You can see I’m tired at the end of the concert, even the voice is a bit tired, but I must be sincere with the audience and show them the truth.  The only thing we did after was to record some of the string parts (that weren’t miked propererly), because Jaques is a perfectionist.”

            Fado means fate, but tracing the origin of the style is difficult.  It may have its roots in Moorish music, or be a mixture of Portuguese folk and the African sounds brought to Lisbon during the days of slavery.  Most likely, it’s a blend of all three, created in the working-class neighborhoods originally populated by sailors who carried the music they’d heard all over the world home with them.  “The Mouraría district, where I grew up, is one of the neighborhoods where fado appeared,” Mariza explains.  “Lisbon was a big port and had a lot of sailors from other countries bringing different cultures in.  That’s why we have this music.  In the beginning, fado came from the working class and the sailors.  They didn’t have newspapers, so they spread the news singing fado.

            “Fado was eventually heard in big upper class saloons, but it belongs in the working class tavernas.  That’s where they maintained the tradition.  There are no fado schools.  We learn the music on the street.  Nothing is written down, they pass the message by singing.  By the end of the 19^th century, the lyrics became one of the most popular poetries of Europe, very rich and emotional.  Today, we are trying to write some of the melodies down and make books and start a museum to research and preserve the old records, but mostly you have to live in an old neighborhood and be asked by the  people (who know the tradition) if you want to learn.  If you come from outside Lisbon, and try to sing fado, they look at you and wonder what you’re doing.  It would be like being a blonde and trying to join an Indian tribe in Brazil.”

            “There are 220 traditional fados—the melodies that everybody sings.  The lyrics are written with precision, according to specific rules.  We work with stanzas of four, five, six, ten or twelve lines of rhythm and you have to know how to count to make the lines fit within a melody.  A fado may have several lyrics or poems that you can fit into it, but it takes a long time to learn how to do it.  Only the old people can teach you.  A lot of people who try to sing fado can’t do it; they don’t know anything about the traditional side of the music.  That’s why we’re asking UNESCO to give us money to help preserve the music.”

            Fado faced hard times during the right-wing dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1974.  The music was seen as subversive, and in response, composers began to concentrate on themes of loss and longing, disguising their messages in the language of love.  Perhaps the concentration on themes of nostalgia and regret were a way for people to implicitly express their desire for a society with more freedom and less repression.  Until recently, many considered the genre quaint and somewhat passé.  In the ‘80s and ‘90s, neo-traditionalists like Cristina Branco and the group Madredeus used fado to forge their own world fusion sound, but it was Mariza who almost single-handedly revived Portuguese, and worldwide interest in traditional fado.

            “I was born in Mozambique to an African mother and Portuguese father,” Mariza recalls.  “I grew up in Lisbon, where my parents had a taverna in the Mouraria district.  They had fado there on the weekends and I got into singing.  I was singing fado at five they tell me.”  Mariza’s father drew little cartoons to help her remember the words, but she had an obvious natural talent, even as a child.  “I never decided to be a singer. I never said I want to be a doctor, lawyer, or singer, although every child normally says that.  When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I’d say: ‘I don’t know.’”

            Mariza grew up, finished school, left home and lived on her own, but she kept singing, always performing. "I had a band in Lisbon doing covers of American music—jazz, funk, soul and standards. We worked professionally, in clubs and casinos, doing weddings on weekends. I had an apartment and lived alone. I was not supported by my parents financially, but in my music, and living the life of a musician, they were very supportive, especially my mother. So I sang and didn't expect anything. I got jobs on cruise ships and lived in Brazil for a while singing bossa nova, but fado was always my first love."

Although she was content as a singer, Mariza had an epiphany a few years ago. "I went to a fado house called Senhor Vinho (Mister Wine) and started singing and suddenly the passion (I had as a child) returned. I said to myself, I want to sing these songs again. They express my feelings better (than pop music.)"

The tavernas that are the home of fado are not like the pubs of England or the bars of the United States. "A fado taverna is a completely crazy place," Mariza explains. "If you have 20 people in the room, it's packed. Everybody smokes a lot and you have to sing through the smoke. They're all drinking red wine and talking loud, but when you start to sing, there is a huge silence. It's so dark you can't see the faces of people; it's lit only by small candles. They're very small and intimate, in traditional working-class neighborhoods. They didn't have money to build huge houses, so everything was made very small. The first time I arrived in New York, even after being in other countries, I was like a donkey looking at a palace. Everything was so big—cars, sidewalks, buildings. In Lisbon everything is more petite."

As she got deeper into fado, Mariza thought about making an album. "Fado opened my heart and I wanted to make a record of these songs to give to my family and friends, that's why I called it Fado en mim (My Fado.) I made the album with my own money, expecting nothing." She labored over the album for more than a year, recording when she had enough money to book studio time.

In the process, she attracted producer Jorge Fernando, one of the last musicians to play with Amalia Rodriques. "He's a nice person, very open and modest. He played with Amalia, but I was not intimidated. When he heard I wanted to do a fado album he offered me some songs and said he'd help me produce it." Fernando also arranged the music, often with input from Mariza, with sounds that moved from the traditional to radical reinventions like "Barquo Negro," with its Afro-Brazilian rhythm track. "Fado always had a bit of percussion. I decided to put on more percussion, maybe that's my African roots showing, I don't know. I wanted the song to be just my voice and percussion. 'Barquo Negro' is about a woman on a beach. She sees a black boat going away—black because it carries her lover and he's not going to return. In the background the old women are saying 'He won't come back, you're crazy, live your life, don't wait..'  I thought percussion captured the spirit of the song. Her heart is beating with a powerful love but in the end, she will be left alone."

In 2001, when Fado En Mim was finished, Mariza's manager insisted on finding a label to put it out. "At that time, if a fado album sold 5,000 records, people were happy. All the labels told us: 'It's not a good time. There's no budget for this kind of music.' Finally a Dutch company said they'd release it and let me do whatever I wanted to do, no obligations. They were a small world music company with only five artists, so I signed with them. Somehow that first album sold 140,000 copies. Then every label wanted a fado singer.

"I don't know why, but even today, other fado artists are still selling the same numbers (as before). I want to say thank you to everyone for paying attention to me. A few months ago, all my records were in the top 20, and I wonder why. Six years ago I was a girl waiting tables and singing covers in clubs and now I'm singing in Sydney and China and Washington, D.C. It's amazing, but I'm still asking myself why they chose me."

In 2003 Fado Curvo, produced by Carlos Maria Trindade of Madredeus, duplicated the success of Fado En Mim and laid the groundwork for Transparente, produced by Jaques Morelenbaum, who has worked with everyone from Tom Jobim to Ryuichi Sakamoto. The album is still fado, but the arrangements reference everything from Brazilian classical music to Zulu jive. "We recorded in Brazil because Jaques likes his old analog studio," Mariza says. "We took the Portuguese guitars to Brazil, but all the musicians were friends of Jaques's and brought their own sounds to the album. I think the music is very intimate. It sounds like poetry. Everybody I play it for has a different idea about the music. Traditional fado people say it's real fado, someone else says it sounds like jazz, other people say it's reggae, everybody hears what they want to hear."

Right now she's preparing a new album, researching the songs which she doesn't want to record in Portugal. She says she's more focused on work and the music if she's not in Lisbon, where her friends and family prove to be a distraction.

Mariza's schedule is again hectic in 2007. In addition to working on the new album, she's touring the world, appearing in many venues with small symphony orchestras that will be playing the charts Morelenbaum wrote for her Concerto Em Lisboa appearance. She's also helping to promote her recent BBC documentary Mariza And The Story Of Fado, a travelogue that takes viewers through the old Lisbon neighborhoods to explore the tavernas and the history of the music, and Fado, a new film directed by Carlos Saura (El Amor Brujo, Taxi, Salomé). Mariza, not unexpectedly, plays a fado singer.

"It's a love story about fado, using lights and white sheets and camera positions to put the concentration on the people singing. It's fantastic." (Saura) pays tribute to the triangle of fado—African slave music, Portuguese music and Africans in Brazil. Lila Downs, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso all appear in the film. They're going to introduce it at Cannes, and the hope is we get to show it in Hollywood. "The movie is fictional and has a beginning and an end, but fado has no end or beginning," the singer says, turning philosophical. "It's a long story, lost in a fog, coming and going like sailors on an endless journey. Like the blues and tango, it's a mysterious music that came from people who passed the music on with their voices and instruments, never writing anything down, so it remains magical and beautiful."

FRANK GEHRY LENDS A HAND

In October 2007, Mariza will finish her U.S. tour in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Center. Frank Gehry, the architect who designed the Center, is a big fan, and is helping design a fado club-style stage set, to give the large hall an intimate feeling more suited to the fado. "I don't know what it's going to look like yet," Gehry says from his LA office. "I've been in her taverna in Lisbon and thought it could be interesting to do that in Disney Hall. Put tables on the stage, with subtle lighting and some kind of backdrop, but we don't have a lot of money to do it and we have to be able to set it up and break it down quickly, because there are shows before and after her. Fortunately, her presence is so great she doesn't need much to capture your attention.”

“I don't know much about fado," the architect explains. "When I was in Lisbon a few years ago, working on a project that never got built, the mayor took me to a club and introduced me to Mariza. We kept in contact, and every time I went to Lisbon I spent some time visiting with her. She's come to L.A. twice, once before at Disney Hall and once at the Hollywood Bowl. I lobbied them to bring her back and offered to do the set for her.”

As for the dress Mariza will wear at the Disney Center: "I have a fashion designer named João Rolô that helps me with my clothes," the singer explains. "I don't have that capacity. I give him the ideas and tell him how I want to appear on stage." Mariza says she hasn't decided on anything for the L.A. show yet, but is excited about the set that Gehry is designing for her.