She's a platinum-haired chanteuse who is re-energizing the music of her homeland, a statuesque ambassador of the haunting, achingly beautiful national music of Portugal.

Mariza, the 29-year-old fado singer who performs in San Francisco and Santa Cruz this weekend, leads the vanguard of fado upstarts who are breathing new life into the tradition-rich genre.

With its songs of deep longing, fado has been likened to blues or flamenco. The emotionally rich acoustic music, which takes its name from the Portuguese word for ``fate,'' traditionally features a singer backed by musicians on Spanish guitar, 12-string Portuguese guitar and acoustic double bass.

Though the Mozambique-born Mariza uses this template, she's turning heads with her own signature style.

On her new disc, ``Fado Curvo,'' she defies convention by adding cello, piano and jazz trumpet. Unlike the traditionalists who often reheat the classics, Mariza also has recorded songs using contemporary Portuguese poems.

In concert, Mariza is an even greater trailblazer. Her electrifying shows leave the more introspective, black-clad formalists in the dust. Mariza doesn't stand still as she squeezes the saudade (the Portuguese word that's loosely translated as ``nostalgic longing'') from almost every line of poetry put to music. She bobs and undulates, swishing her designer dress in a way that makes her 5-foot-9-inch frame seem to tower over the audience. Her clarion voice lands every note, nimbly manipulating the music as she expresses a romantic lament or recalls an exhilarating day at a fair.

``She just exudes a confidence,'' says Derek Beres, managing editor of Global Rhythm, the world-music magazine published in New York City. ``Fado, with the swooping harmonies and melodies, is gorgeous, but she has the ability to penetrate certain walls and really hit you at a level that hasn't been heard from since Amália Rodrigues.''

Rodrigues was the grande dame of fado before her death in 1999 at age 79. The comparison is a mixed blessing that any accomplished female fadoista must endure. After hitting her creative peak in her 40s, Rodrigues had a patina of life experience that gave her music a world-weary authenticity.

``It is not fair to me,'' Mariza says about the comparison during a phone interview from a television studio in Porto, Portugal. ``It is wonderful when they say, `Oh, I remember Amália when I listen to you,' but I think it's not fair to Amália. I'm just a girl who likes to sing fado.''

Mariza has been singing fado professionally for only a decade. She perhaps begged comparisons to the earlier vocalist by recording four Rodrigues songs on ``Fado Em Mim,'' her 2001 debut disc. But the new album distances Mariza from Rodrigues with a more contemporary and still-evolving style.

Unlike such new-generation fado singers as Misia and Cristina Branco, Mariza has a richly multi-ethnic heritage suited to a music born out of the cross-cultural legacy of Portugal's seafaring past. With a father of Portuguese, Spanish and German heritage and a mother with roots in Africa, India and Portugal, Mariza believes that such a background gives her an advantage.

``Fado is not a pure music,'' she says, ``Maybe I feel very connected because I have mixed roots.''

Those roots have perhaps translated to an openness that allows her to draw, at least intuitively, on everything from bossa nova to jazz. But Mariza is steeped in fado. At age 5, she jumped into spontaneous fado singalongs at her parents' restaurant in Mouraria, one of Lisbon's most traditional neighborhoods and a hotbed of the genre. Even in the bathroom, she found herself breaking into fado.

As a teenager, Mariza says, friends called attention to her ``different'' style of singing, and she ended up ``running away from fado.'' She tried other types of music and eventually sang jazz, bossa nova and blues for a band in Brazil in 1996.

``But when the people heard I was Portuguese, they asked me to sing fado,'' she says. ``I was a little bit nervous because I was singing the culture of my country. At the end of one evening, I sang a fado for fun. It was like a storm,'' she says of the spirited response.

Mariza's career as one of the most promising fadoistas was soon under way, and within five years of that show, her debut CD was released.

Though she has taken liberties with the form -- and she says she dreams of singing with Tony Bennett -- there are some boundaries that Mariza will not cross. She respects this tradition-rich music too much to break completely from her largely classical approach.

``This is my life,'' she says. ``I belong here. I belong to this music.''

Mariza

Where: Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus Ave., San Francisco

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Tickets: $22-$25; (415) 474-0365, www.bimbos365club.com

Also: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, $22-$25, (831) 429-1812, www.riotheatre.com