IN THE GRIP OF FATE; NEW QUEEN OF PORTUGUESE FADO BALLADS EASES THE OLD, BITTERSWEET MUSICAL FORM INTO THE 21ST CENTURY. 

The Portuguese star Mariza, who makes her Florida debut on Wednesday in Miami Beach, lives by her devotion to a style of music that is more than 150 years old.  She started singing fado-- the famously, indulgently bittersweet old ballad form that might as well be Portugal's second language-- as a child.  But having been born in the 1970s, she also knows what it is to be charmed by 20trh century music from America.

"I tried to sing pop music when I was a teenager," says the singer, talking by telephone from Lisbon in musically accented English.  "And I tried to sing some blues, and I tired to sing some jazz."

"But for me," she continues, "it was not my language.  It was not my music and my culture."

Fado is.  The word means "fate," and Mariza has surrendered to it completely.  In the process she has become something of a pop icon nonetheless-- hailed the world over as he inheritor in spirit and sound to Portugal's late, great queen of fad, Amalia Rodrigues.  In American terms, this is not unlike declaring a new Elvis and having the title holder live up to the billing.  Mariza, who has just released her second album Fado Curvo (Times Square Records), seems to be confirming the accolades that proceeded even the first album as she alights at Miami Beach's Lincoln Theater.

She came to the attention of all Portugal in 1999, the year Rodrigues died, when, as a Lisbon club singer, she was tapped for a brief guest turn on a pair of televised tributes to fado's first lady.  

Mariza stunned a nation, so much so that in 200, she was dubbed the "Voice of Fado" by Central FM, Portugal's national radio network.  As demand for an album grew, she demurred, insisting that she was a club performer, not a recording artist.  Even now, she says of Fado, "It's not a music for big audiences."  But she relented.  Fado En Mim, which included several songs made famous by Rodrigues, arrived last year to great acclaim and a widening circle of performance throughout Europe.  The torch has passed.

In hindsight, Mariza's enviable fate might have been sealed early.

"I have sung fado since I was 5 years old.," she says, not sounding prideful so much as awed by the music's near-life-long hold on her.

Born in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, she moved with her family to Lisbon as a child and grew up in Mouaria, a neighborhood that many call the birthplace of fado.  Mariza-- pronounced "Ma-REE-suh"-- says she remembers hearing fado "in every corner, in every street, in every house."  She sang along, and her civil-servant father drew cartoons to help his daughter memorize the words.

The music of Mouaria grew out of the city's identity as an Atlantic Ocean port; the earliest fado described the lot of sailors.  The sound of fado reflected travels in which seamen absorbed songs from the Middle East, Africa, and South America. The hope and worry that mark a life of constant leaving gave the music its emotional color, the saudade that translates to a kind of hard-to-please longing beyond words.

Fado can be a sigh that expresses that longing, but it is not a resigned exaltation.  Fado singing is nakedly emotional, the vocalist framed-- but never obscured-- in her show of feeling by a Moorish lattice of acoustic bass, six-string guitar and piercing 12-string Portuguese guitar.  Fado has male singers, but few are celebrated with the fervor accorded women.

Mariza sometimes adds piano and violin, building on the tradition without disturbing it.  And when she sings her fatalistic songs, the back stories do not have to be strictly nautical.  But she, or any accomplished fado singer, including contemporaries such as Misia and Dulce Pontes, can be uniquely expressive about the trials of separation and the uncertainty of return-- whatever the context.

Fado had its undisputed 20th century stat in the raven haired Rodrigues, a figure of great international stature, as adored by fans of the music as Maria Callas was in the world of opera.  And like Callas, she radiated beauty and anguish.

"I have so much sadness in me," Rodrigues once said.  "I am a pessimist, a nihilist.  Everything fado demands in a singer I have in me.  When I am on my own, alone, tragedy comes, and solitude."

What's striking about Mariza, as she talks brightly and laughs without prompting, is the utter lack of tragic aura.

"I feel fado," she says.  But she does not live it offstage in the same wrung-out way.  That apparent ease may be a source of the skepticism voiced by a few unimpressed listeners.  These doubters hear Mariza "edging the tragic purity of a fado singer's art toward histronics," as Britain' Independent summarized the minority opinion.  

In fairness to Mariza, she lives in different times. Rodrigues came of age with the one-time naval empire decline and its people acutely aware of their ebbing greatness-- a perfect psychological climate for fado.  Rodrigues was herself caught up in the post-colonial turmoil, accused of nostalgia for the old fascist rulers who were ousted in a 1974 coup.  She protested her innocence in person and even in song, and the country eventually reconciled with her.  But Rodrigues would always be singing through a veil of real-life tears.

Mariza lives in a Portugal that no longer suffers the loss of its worldly responsibilities.  She has the luxury of the irreverence one hears in her playful description of a recurring fado image: the lighted cigarette.

"There's a lot of smoke," she says, laughing, "because everybody smokes a lot."

If fado was destined to have a new queen, perhaps the only sensible poise was a postmodern-- some 21st century soul able to step outside her own experience and look at it with bemusement.  Mariza, for all her immersion on a genre that thrives on memory, is a strikingly contemporary figure.  With her Afro-European looks and short, plaited blond hair, she could walk into any rave night or electronica club in the world and be the instant center of attention.

But she has that instinctual way with an older world's music. She says of singing fado, "It's like breathing; I don't have to think."

That, as much as any innate quality, ensures that Mariza will likely always be singing odes to the inconsolable and to a gloriously unretrievable past.

-Sean Piccoli