The crowd at Lauryn Hill concert at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl amphitheater last summer was already braced for an eclectic performance from the hip-hop diva when a Portuguese chanteuse Mariza took the stage.

Instead of chic foreign rap music, drum-n-bass or avant jazz, however, the urban, hip set was introduced to a traditional music called fado.

“They were completely silent.  I was surprised, no one was talking during the performance,” said Portuguese fado singer Mariza, who will perform Monday night at the Cedar Cultural Center. 

Had they not paid attention to Mariza’s opening set, they would have missed the delicate subtleties of her folk songs backed with a trio of guitarists. 

But it’s likely their attention was captured by her voice. 

At 27, the Lisbon native boasts a throat worthy of an opera soprano.  That, paired with fado’s emotional impact, is probably the reason Mariza’s name has been on the lips of world-music critics for the past year.

In December, her debut, “Fado em Mim,” numbered in the Top 10 of world-music releases for the Los Angeles Times’ annual tally, and it received similar treatment in the music journal Afropop Worldwide. Earlier this year, the BBC named her best European artist in its annual world-music awards.

The attention is unprecedented for a fado singer, since the music is rarely heard outside of Portugal.

The melodic elements of fado (fate in Portuguese) can be traced to the mid-19^th century, but it did not identify itself until the early 20^th in the slums of Lisbon’s Alfama district.  There, Afro-Brazilian dance and local folk music were combined to deliver tales of love, pain and death, and the music is often filled with melancholy.

Fado gained world attention in the late 1950’s when Amalia Rodrigues stepped out from the vaudevillian “fado houses,” where the music was confined, to perform concerts nationally and, soon after, in Brazil and Paris.  When she died in 1999, her country’s prime minister ordered three days of national mourning, declaring her “the voice of Portugal.”

With Mariza’s swift rise to prominence, critics are quick to crown her the next Rodrigues, and it’s a role she does not play down.  Rather than venturing off into pop-savvy hybrids of her music, as Ethiopian singer Gigi did in her flirtations with electronica, Mariza stayed true to fado song structures, the lyrics of which are taken from famous stories or Portuguese poems.  “Fado em Mim,” consisted entirely of well-known fado arrangements. 

Reviewers have remarked that her luxurious stage costumes, cut by designers with an eye to the music’s dark and fatalistic tones, add potency to her traditional performances. 

But like Rodrigues, who gained fame for expanding fado’s preoccupations with heartache to more political and social concerns, Mariza strikes new ground on her latest album, “Fado Curvo,” released last week. 

“I want to sing my music.  Music that speaks about me,” she said in a husky voice in a phone interview. 

Mariza stepped away from decades-old cantos that made up the body of fado lyrics and incorporated the work of anti-fascist poet Jose Afonso in her song “Menino do Bairro Negro (Little Boy of the Black Quarter).”

There are some musical departures from tradition, as well, with pop melodies and jazz piano and trumpet adding vacant texture to the song “O Deserto.”

“Curvo means that which is not straight.  Life is not a straight line, like passion, like music,” Mariza said.  “You know, when we talk about fado, the one thing I don’t want is to put it in a kind of museum.  It needs to grow, it needs to walk further.”

By Reggie Royston