Music: Mariza sings about the feelings in life -- and everyone understands

In Concert

Mariza

Where: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 6265 Crescent Rd. at UBC

When: Saturday at 8 p.m.

Tickets: S42-$47 at Ticketmaster,

John P. McLaughlin
ON MUSIC

Slim as a sapling, imperial of bearing and given to grand, sweeping gestures befitting a European grand dame of the stage, platinum- haired Marina is Portugal's pre-eminent exponent of fado, the impassioned national folk music originally the exclusive province of Lisbon's bandits, sailors, prostitutes and pimps.

But not unlike jazz and blues in America, at the turn of the 20th century rent fado became a fashion among the aristocracy and, aided by many a casket of red wine, eventually morphed into the music of all the people.

By definition it's a musical salmagundi, a mix of songs made up by itinerant Portuguese sailors stirred with African-slave rhythms and a variety of other spices, Brazilian to Semitic. It can sound like a cross between Greek bouzouki folk and Argentine tango.

Mariza is no less a hodge-podge of bloodlines: African, Indian, French, German and, of course, Portuguese. She calls herself Metis.

Born in Mozambique, her parents moved to Portugal when Mariza was three years old and settled in the old, red-tiled roof district of Lisbon, where they ran a small taverna with wine hot- des hanging from the ceiling.

"It was in Mouraria," she says, "the neighbourhood where fado was born in the 19lh century. I think I didn't have a choice because fado was my toy, my doll. They used fado like a way of living, fado was surrounding me all the time. Some people ask me: 'Who choose who?' and I don't know but think fado, it choose me."

Which sounds like a bummer childhood. Fado seems rather sad, tragic, throat-clutching stuff but "no, no, it's not," Mariza insists. "If you go to a taverna in Mouraria and you see all the people inside the taverna being all together, drinking red wine, with the music, it's not a sad feeling or melancholy thing, it's very happy"

Interestingly, fado was out of favour for years with the very people who first developed it, connected as it was to the rule of the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Mariza was just a year old when his regime fell in 1970 and it's been she and her generation -- who have no memory of the Salazar years -- who have revitalized the music.

Emerging from them all, Mariza seems poised to take over the place of Amalia Rodrigues, called "the voice of Portugal's soul" at her death in 1999, upon which the government declared three days of national mourning. Like Rodrigues, Mariza is constructing an ever growing global following.

Her last visit to Vancouver in the spring of 2004, she sold out the Chan Centre and, just this summer, was invited to perform at Bob Geldof’s Live 8 - Africa Calling, a benefit close to the heart of the Mozambique native. And amazingly, she does it all singing a language most of her audiences don't understand.

"Yes, I'm singing Portuguese and Portuguese is not a very popular language," says Mariza.

"But it is because this type of music talks about the feelings of life so, when you are singing, you are sending these messages that are universal because everybody knows about love, about sadness, happiness. For all the different types of audiences I had I never felt like they are not understanding. We are in the same tuning. That's the magical thing of music."

jpmac@gmx.net