Interview with Mariza

Mariza doesn’t just sing fado, the emotion-packed Portuguese song form. She gives this old-school music a new sense of cool.

World-music fans adore it, but her task is a bit trickier in Portugal, where a nasty whiff of fascism still surrounds fado.

“We’ve heard the stories and we’re still trying to understand what happened,” Mariza said in accented English from her home in Lisbon. “But I didn’t live at that time. That was the old generation.”

Long before the 33-year-old singer became the international phenom she is today, the traditional music she mines was abused as an implement of oppression by Portugal’s fascist dictatorships.

For decades after the 1930s, fado lyrics had to be approved by censors so as not to undermine the reigning nationalist party line, and this haunting music - often compared to the blues - took on yet another layer of dark melancholy.

For Mariza and other young fado singers such as Cristina Branco, Misia and Katia Guerreiro, the history they’re building on isn’t political, but musical and cultural.
“The fado of today is about the new generations, the new Portugal, while also gravitating towards some of the traditional things,” said the singer, who appears Saturday at Berklee Performance Center. “Our music isn’t connected to political history.”

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Interview with Mariza

"The word fado means destiny or fate and I started singing the traditional songs when I was five years old."

She says fado is characterised by emotional tunes and lyrics.

According to one world music website, fado music is the heart of the Portuguese soul and is arguably the oldest urban folk music in the world.

Some say the music came as a dance from Africa in the 19th century and was adopted by the poor on the streets of Lisbon.

"Whatever its origins, its themes have remained constant: Destiny, betrayal in love, death and despair."

Mariza was born in Mozambique, but her family moved to Portugal when she was a baby. There she got involved in fado houses where singing was a spontaneous part of everyday life.

For a while she gave up fado and started singing soul, gospel and jazz. But she was drawn back to fado in her 20s and hasn't looked back.

"I think that people see my personality on stage and that's my way of showing this. What people are going to see is an artist and I hope they like what she represents."

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Interview with Mariza

Mariza, the striking, single-monikered singer who has become the international face of the traditional Portuguese song form called fado has broken a barrier or three in her career.

Born 33 years ago in Mozambique, of African and European background (her mother was from Mozambique, her father from Portugal and her full name is Mariza Reis Nunes), Mariza grew up in Lisbon's Mouraria-Alfama district whose clubs and taverns frequented by sailors, prostitutes, the children of slaves and working men and women were said to have been the 19th-century birthplace of fado.

It was there, as a precocious five-year-old, that she began to sing the slow, rhythmic, often melancholic songs, what some have called the Portuguese blues. Though steeped in the traditions and enamoured of the greatest fado singer of the 20th century, Amalia Rodriguez, when Mariza returned to singing fado in her early 20s, after a teenage flirtation with jazz and pop, she began to make small but significant changes to a style largely unchanged in 150 years.

With her closely cropped platinum blonde hair and a penchant for colourful necklaces, rather than the traditional black bun and severe black clothes, Mariza would have stood out anyway.

But when she added hints of Brazilian rhythms, jazz and, more recently, a full orchestra rather than only the Portuguese guitar as backing, the slender singer ran the risk of offending the purists even as she opened up fado to a generation more interested in rock and pop than the "old" music.

However, any opprobrium at home was quelled as soon as she opened her mouth to sing. A similar effect was obvious among fado novices as we discovered last year when Mariza was a success at the Sydney Festival.

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Concerto Em Lisboa by Mariza

Thanks to three albums and a batch of memorable concerts, Mariza has transformed the international status of fado, the Portuguese answer to the blues, and rightly established herself as an international diva. So far she hasn't put a foot wrong, and now comes a live set recorded last year at what was clearly a memorable outdoor event in Lisbon, at which her sad-edged, passionate and dramatic singing was exquisite as ever, and she was backed by the Sinfonietta de Lisboa, conducted by the celebrated Brazilian arranger and producer Jaques Morelenbaum.

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An interview with fado singer Mariza

"The Australian" publishes an interview with Mariza, a few days before her performance at the Sydney Festival

THE woman seems to have it all: the designer gowns, the meticulous platinum hair, those deep brown eyes and that stunning face that leaps out at you from the cover of her latest disc, Transparente.

Live on stage in Barcelona on a balmy night in the outdoor Teatro Grec, she's just as beguiling: she appears much taller than she is and radiates warmth and sassiness in equal measure. She coaxes her audience into tears with a mournful fado ballad, gets them clapping along to a happier number, then has them laughing at her stories.

You can find the full interview here.