She has just finished a truncated promotional performance near the back of a Tower Records store in San Francisco, and Mariza is not pleased.  Tall and lithe, a black shawl draped around her shoulders, her makeup impeccable and every hair on her tightly plaited blond coiffure in place, she looks every bit the radiant rising star of fado, the soulful, acoustic guitar-driven urban folk music of Portugal.  But the hint of a diva scowl has put a shadow across Mariza’s distinctively sculpted face.

“If I’m in a small taverna, it’s OK,” says the Lisbon-bred singer, having settled into a chair in the record store’s back office.  “If I’m onstage, it’s OK.  If I’m with friends in the middle of dinner and I decide to sing, it’s OK.  But I can’t really be comfortable singing in the middle of a store.  It’s impersonal.” Despite the unfavorable conditions, exacerbated by an uncooperative PA system that has to be turned off after the first song, Mariza had her accompanying trio of two guitarists and a bassist enthralled the 75 or so fans who had gathered to catch a glimpse of the world’s reigning fadista.  Her finely grained voice magnified the music’s inherent ardor as it soared through three fados, including the classic “Primavera,” indelibly associated with the late queen of Portuguese fado singers, Amalia Rodrigues.

With only two CDs to her credit, 2002’s Fado Em Mim and last year’s Fado Curvo (World Connection B.V./Times Square Records, www.worldconnection.nl), Mariza has already been compared favorably to Rodrigues and honored with a 2003 BBC Radio 3 World Music Award (Best European Act) and the 2003 Personality of the Year award in Portugal.  “It’s really good, but I don’t call that success,” Mariza argues. “I call that interest.  People are very interested to know a little bit about my music.  It’s a very special type of people who are trying to understand this music.  The audience that comes to listen to it is very small.  You can’t call that success.  Success is the Rolling Stones.  I don’t have that, and if I were to have it, I don’t think I would like it.  My life is completely crazy now.  If I had that type of thing, it would become completely wild.”

Along with her Portuguese contemporary Cristina Branco, and paralleling the emissary role of older artists like Cesaria Evora and the late Astor Piazzolla in the related musical genres of Cape Verdean morna and Argentinean tango Mariza is taking fado to the world.  In Protuguese, fado means fate, and the singer regards her career as a matter of destiny.  “I think I didn’t have a choice,” she says.  Although born in Mozambique, she moved with her family to Lisbon when she was three.  “My father is a fado lover,” she explains, “and we lived in a very traditional neighborhood where musicologists say fado was born in the 19^th century.  Everybody there sings fado.  They don’t sing in a professional way, but imagine, they are cleaning the windows and singing, making dinner and singing.  I passed all my childhood and teenage years listening to fado.”

Her parents operated a small restaurant and hosted fado performances on Sunday afternoons, and although her mother would send her home, young Mariza would sneak back and secrete herself behind a door or on a stairway, soaking in the music.  “It was not he voiced of the poems that attracted me,” she explains, “but the sound of the Portuguese guitar.  I was not looking for the voice.  I was waiting for the answers to the voice.  I was waiting for that sound.  It is like crystal.  It is so melencholic, sometimes you are listening to the music and you feel the instrument is crying.  That was my first passion in fado.”

A 12-string descendent of the lute, tuned B A E B A D in octave pairs, the modern Portuguese guitar is built in two styled – Coimbra, with a 470 mm. Scale and a shield-shape headstock, and Lisbon (which Luis Guerriero plays in Mariza’s band), with a 440 mm. Scale and scroll head design.  In fado groups, the Portuguese guitar is joined by a nylon six-string, referred to as the “acoustic guitar” (played by Antonio Netto behind Mariza).  Until the recent fado revival inspired the introduction of courses in the music conservatory in Lisbon, the only way to learn Portuguese guitar was from eders at home, on the street, or in the tavernas.

During her teens and early 20s, Mariza traveled extensively and detoured musically through rock, soul, funk and bossa nova.  Since returning to fado she has immersed herself in the music’s social and cultural history.  “Fado is a combination of rhythms and songs of African slaves and the sailors who appeared in the 19th century in Lisbon,” she explains.  “Over the years, they forgot fado has a lot of rhythm; having an African bass player [Laurindo Sousa] gives me so much rhythm.”  She takes liberties with her repertoire, putting new music to handpicked Portuguese poems, and her arrangements, occasionally including piano, cello, or trombone in the mix.  But innovation, she says, is not her goal.  “It’s not my responsibility to change things or make fado new, to bring fado to other types of people, or even keep fado alive in my country,” she explains.  “What’s most important for me is respecting tradition, studying and doing research, asking the old people about fado, having my own sound, and being very sincere in my work.”

Mariza confesses to being aloof and suspicious of other people’s motives.  “But when I’m onstage,” she adds, “I’m completely open.  It’s like being naked, showing everything.  Fado was my fado [fate].  I can’t run from it.  I belong to fado like it belongs to me.  I can’t think of my life separate from this type of music.”