29-year-old is new queen of lament

Traditional style is her starting point

John Goddard

Toronto Star

The death three years ago of Portugal’s top fado singer intensified a long-felt need by listeners for a new queen of the rich, elegant, lament-filled music.

Now she seems to have arrived.

She is called simply Mariza.  She is 29 years old, born in Mozambique and raised in the traditional Mouraria neighborhood of Lisbon, Portugal, where from the age of 5 she joined in the singing at her parents’ restaurant.

On stage, she cuts a dramatic figure.  Her hair is platinum blond, close-cropped and so elegantly coiffed in stylized, symmetrical curls that it looks punk.  Onstage, she often wears high-fashion gowns, with a tight waist, billowing skirts and touched of black or white lace.

“No, no, no,” she says cheerfully when she is asked if she is preparing to fill the shoes of Amelia Rodrigues, who, beginning in 1939, enjoyed a long music and film career as the world’s most celebrated fadista.

“I don’t think like that and I don’t want to think like that,” she says with a laugh on the phone from Portugal earlier this summer.  “I’m not preparing to sing from her grave, I’m sorry.  I just perform my music and do what I feel.”

Clearly, Mariza is her own person, but she also seems ready both to satisfy demand for a new fado queen and to bring the “Portuguese blues” to a wider world-music audience – the way Cesaria Evora brought morna of the Cape Verse Islands to global consequence, and Susanna Baca made famous the sound of black Peru.

In February, Mariza won “best European artist” at the BBC Awards for World Music and, in March, she taped a live concert in London for BBC Television.  She is currently on a tour of more than 150 dates in Europe, South America, the United States and Canada.

“That prize opened the doors,” she says of the BBC award.  “It is bringing people to hear and understand my music.”

Last year, at the two week Festival d’ete in Quebec, Mariza also won the Coup se Coeur award for most outstanding performance.  That year also took her to Toronto for the first time, performing at the Lebatt Blues Festival at Harbourfront Centre.

Her Toronto return was scheduled for May but was cancelled at the last minute due to the SARS scare.  Mariza and her band appear Saturday at the Isabel Bader Theatre.

So far, she has released two CDs internationally.

The first, Fado em Mim, in 2001, featured five songs made famous by Rodrigues and became the first album to reach gold status (20,000 units) in Portugal since anything by the legend herself.

The second, Fado Curvo, released in April, includes only one Rodrigues song – “Primavera” – in a new arrangement.

The emphasis now, Mariza says, is to go into her own direction, wherever that leads.

For her, respect for tradition does not mean following the straight and narrow, a philosophy suggested in her latest title.

“Curvo means that which is not straight,” she says.

“Life is not a straight line, like passion, like music…I started thinking it would better to create fados my own way.”

Fado is traditionally accompanied mainly by the six-string viola guitar and 12-string Portuguese guitar.

To her touring ensemble, Mariza has added an acoustic bass, and to Fado Curvo, she has unconventionally expanded the repertoire on some songs to include piano, cello, trumpet and percussion.

On every number, the instruments serve to accentuate her own soothing, dramatic and captivating voice.

Just the facts

Who: Mariza

Where: Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles St. W.

When: Saturday, Aug. 9 @8 p.m.

Tickets: $30 @ 416.504.7529