The not-so-sweet saudade of success

EDMONTON - Fado is sometimes called the blues music of Portugal, and its central subject is saudade -- the feeling that something essential to one's experience has been lost. So it may have been inevitable that Mariza, the new international star of fado, would have had a crisis of saudade just when everything seemed to be going her way.

Her debut record, Fado em mim, was a monster hit in her own country two years ago, and one of the first fado discs ever to make a strong impression in North America. By this time last year, Mariza was riding a wave of renewed interest in roots music from all over, performing 130 concerts a year -- and wondering why her life was such a mess. "I was not understanding anything any more," she said. "I was feeling very tired, and always bad tempered. I was treating my voice like a crystal, and it was feeling like a crystal. I was trying to understand what was happening to my life. Everything was controlled by someone else. Not my music, but my life." She spoke with liquid gestures of her long fingers, and a shy half-smile. Mariza in conversation, a day before her concert at the Edmonton Folk Festival, was a study in focused languor, her slim, boyish frame nestled in an armchair, her eyes peering intently from under her newsboy cap or slipping away toward some reservoir of sadness.

In some ways, her story is the familiar one of the young musician who makes an album with no great expectations, and hence no idea of how to cope when the phone begins to ring and tickets begin to sell for concerts in towns five thousand miles from home. But for Mariza, the saudade of success was just another chapter in a very tangled relationship with the music that has made her famous.

She was born and raised to sing fado. She grew up in one of the Lisbon neighbourhoods where the music developed some two centuries ago and remains a deep-dyed part of local culture. Her parents owned a restaurant and held fado gatherings on weekends. Her father taught his only child to sing the old songs from the time she was five, drawing pictures to remind her of lyrics, taping melodies that she would hear as she fell asleep at night. In short, she studied in the only academy known to fado -- the street, the kitchen and the underground haunts of old singers and aficionados. In her own opinion, however, she was a failed student. She noticed that her father only admired male fadistas. Most of the songs he taught her were in fact done by men, and never in the way she did them.

"I always had the feeling I was not a good singer," she said. "I listened to the old singers, and I was not like them. Everybody would say I was different, and I was thinking that if it was different, that must be a negative thing. I thought I was not doing it correctly. When you're a teenager, you don't think that being different can be a positive thing. . . I was always feeling bad when I sang, and very afraid. So I decided not to sing fado any more."

She went to Brazil, with the idea of learning about the bossa nova that her Mozambican mother loved as fiercely as her father did fado . But when the people running the cruise ship she was working on discovered she knew fado, they made her sing it for the guests.

Back in Portugal, she sang jazz, formed a soul band and worked up some demos of pop songs tinged with the music of her childhood, and got a contract to record them seriously with an important producer in Britain. Two weeks before the sessions, she cancelled the project, broke up the band, and turned back to the music she had been trying to get away from.

"I started going to the fado places again, listening to all the old singers, remembering everything. I was so in love. . . Everybody was telling me to make a record, so I did the songs I used to sing when I was a child and a teenager. It was just something I did for family and friends."

Fado em mim was greeted almost as a manifesto of a new fado. The arrangements sometimes broke dramatically from the mandolins and Portuguese guitars of traditional fado. Mariza sang in a more open and less tremulous style than the old masters, though with a husky grandeur that declared her lineage with every note. Even her look was new: elegant couture and a marcelled hairstyle that looked like an updated version of a classy Prohibition 'do. Several tours later, she was ready to quit. She went home to Lisbon last December, determined to figure out what to do about the chaos in her life, and the nagging signals from her record company that it was time to do a second record, even better and more commercial than the last. Her father said she would be crazy not to go on. But she decided that going on would have to mean going deeper into fado, without any idea of making it more pop or more commercial.

She took poems by Fernando Pessoa and others that she had been obsessively gathering and showed them to her collaborator and pianist Tiago Machado, and to any other composer who might have something new to say in the idiom of fado. She got a new producer, less concerned with dressing up fado in pop clothing and more willing to let her record in complete takes with her band, as if the studio were a taverna.

Fado Curvo came out last spring, and is both a bigger departure from fado's past and a more reverent salute to its traditions than Fado em mim. Most of the songs are original. The arrangements feel more settled and assured than some of the pop experiments of the first disc. Mariza seems to be coming into her own style, and she knows it.

"It feels more mature to me, and more intellectual. These are great poets, and in fado, we really have to talk about serious things, even when we are joking or making fun . . . My biggest preoccupation was to find my own sound, and to make arrangements that felt correct. I'm very happy with it, and I thought that even if nobody who bought the first one liked it, they could never take away the pleasure of doing it."

Fado Curvo has joined Fado em mim on the Portuguese charts, and Mariza has returned to the road with a new serenity. She's not so worried about whether the air conditioning is too cold for her throat, or why some journalist wants to know why she sings a certain phrase this way or that, or who does her hair and clothes (two old friends). She knows now that one way or another she will sing fado till she dies.