The Tennessean, Feature - CD Review >>
"I live a completely normal life," said Portuguese singer Mariza, who does not live a completely normal life.
People with normal lives don't travel internationally, receive ovations with regularity or go by only one name. People with normal lives aren't received with adulation in places far from home. And they aren't considered national treasures in their own country.
"Of course, people in Portugal know me," Mariza said. "But Portuguese people are very polite, very shy. They look, and they smile, and they said, 'I have your record' or 'I love your voice.' But they say that in a very soft way. It's not Barbra Streisand not being able to walk on the street. In Portugal, people are more soft."
In America, people are not soft. We honk, we plead and occasionally we harass. Yet Mariza's career is still in a building stage in this country. In Portugal, the musical form known as fado is a way of life. In the United States, it is an aberration, though a beautiful one.
Fado honors her father
In either place, Mariza is among fado's most accomplished and impressive practitioners. And fado, though typically sung in Portuguese, is lovely and melancholy enough to charm even audiences that cannot understand the words being sung. Traditional fado is typically sung to a sparse backdrop of a couple of guitars, with the vocals providing the songs' emotional sweep. Mariza's sound is based in fado, but inclusive enough to bring in other influences.
"I started singing at 5," she said. "I used to sing in my neighborhood. But we lived awhile in Brazil, and I tried to understand those rhythms. I am half African, and the Brazilian rhythms have a lot to do with that music. I returned home again, though, and I was singing fado for a friend."
The friend liked the music, and said as much. In 1999, fado's most beloved singer, Amalia Rodrigues, died, and the nation's mourning period brought a renewed interest in fado. Mariza performed at a broadcast tribute to Rodrigues, and suddenly people — very polite people, she assures — were nudging her to make an album.
Mariza did not always feel so accepted and revered in Portugal.
"People think when you're a child you don't understand anything," she said. "But I was understanding everything. When I was 3 years old, we were moving from a motel in Portugal to another motel. We were without money. My mom is very dark, and my father is half German — a dark woman with a blonde man. When I was a child, people sometimes looked at me like, 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' My father had the idea to start doing fado, because we were hearing fado everywhere, in each corner and in each taverna and coffee shop. And the fadistas had a special way of dressing and moving and speaking."
Mariza's father loved for her to sing fado, and her entry into the world of recording musicians came when people, as she puts it, "touched the name of my father."
"I did it thinking it would be something to offer to my father," she said. "He never went to see me singing other things. I sang bossa nova, some jazz, some blues. I invited him many times to come and see me, and he said, 'No, I only go to see you on the day you sing fado.' The day that happened, he was there."
'Music is music'
Soon, Mariza finished an album. And then people began to ask why she didn't have a label. In truth, fado was considered somewhat quaint even in its home of Portugal, and record companies considered 3,000 to be an acceptable sales total for a fado album.
"If they sold 4,000, it was amazing," Mariza said. "I did not want to sign a deal. I thought there would be problems. But I finally signed with a man who was saying, 'It's going to be OK.' Suddenly, in Portugal, we started with the first record, and it sold 140,000."
Of late, Mariza has been working with a filmmaker who is telling the story of fado through a documentary. And Mariza's immense popularity in her homeland has opened doors in North America and elsewhere. She is forwarding both fado and her own career, and, like Alison Krauss did in bluegrass, Mariza is expanding her genre's sonic boundaries even as she is spreading the word about an oft-overlooked art form.
"There is a new generation who are in the mood of capturing their tradition, embracing it, taking care and understanding that we don't have a minor culture or a minor music," she said. "We have a rich culture to protect."
As for whether a Nashville audience might have a learning curve to overcome, Mariza says Music City should take rather quickly to the sounds of her country.
"Music is music," she said. "Fado is music with a culture, with roots and with a heartbeat from the people. This music is touched in the feelings of life, of human beings. We sing about death, and faith, and longing, and destiny, happiness, joy, love, jealousy and everything that makes us human beings. With this music, you don't feel the barrier of language. You're going to understand. Music enters the soul very slowly and moves the feelings inside of you. You are with the roots of Portugal, and you make a trip around the world. And I'm going to explain things, don't worry."
By: Peter Cooper
03/08/09 >> go there
