Amid all the depressing economic news emanating day after day in Portugal, even melancholic fado music can provide welcome light relief, especially when sung by Ana Moura. It is also giving solace of sorts to Portuguese emigrants who have sought a better life abroad.
There can be no
greater compliment to a female fado singer than to be likened to the iconic Amália
Rodrigues. Although bordering on the heretical to some older fado aficionados,
this is the kind of reputation Ana Moura is garnering on her current tour of Europe
and North America.
So far this month
she has performed to full houses in San Francisco,
Boston, New York,
Washington and Cleveland. This weekend it’s Chicago
and Minneapolis, then on to North
Carolina and Ontario.
A correspondent
for the Boston Globe described Moura
as “one of the latest singers to come out of the Lisbon taverns, where fado’s
essence resides, and become one of its global ambassadors. She embodies, at a
high level, modern fado’s duality: her potent contralto and her traditional
fado treatments have earned her Amália comparisons at home – the ultimate
connoisseur’s praise.”
As a fado
“ambassador,” Moura is rivalling Mozambique-born Mariza who in the past decade has
reportedly sold a million records and played more than a thousand concerts
worldwide.
Moura has been
singing fado since the age of six. Her interpretations of the form of music
unique to the Portuguese have moved on from the purely traditional songs she
learned from her fado-singing parents in Santarém.
“I started to
grow up and listen to all kinds of styles, and I always sang many styles, but I
always felt as a fado singer. It’s a way to express your feelings, your soul,”
says Moura, now 33.
Rather shy
off-stage, she has resisted being ‘programmed’ as a performer and cherished individual
freedom of expression. “We are authentic if we sing with our souls. It should
come from inside. I want the spontaneity that my parents taught me when I was
young,” she says.
It helps, but you
don’t have to understand Portuguese to appreciate fado. “If you have the
emotion, the message can be felt by the audience even if they don’t understand
the lyrics,” she told the Plain Dealer
in Cleveland, Ohio. In her recently released album, Desfado, three of the 14 songs are in
English. One is called “Thank You, and the lyrics include the lines “Thank you
for making me cry” and “Thank you for breaking my heart.”
Said a music critic
in the New York Daily News, “The
point, it seems, is to savour emotion itself, to celebrate the frisson of
feeling beyond consequence. It takes a singer of rare passion to articulate the
nuances of such risks and, right now, the Lisbon-based Moura stands at the
forefront of them.”
Her innovative fado
renditions sometimes incorporate elements of modern popular music. Some of her
melodies are even downright jaunty, but much of what she sings is still
plaintive. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones put his finger on it by
describing fado as “Portuguese blues.”
On meeting her
for the first time, Richards also succinctly summed up another of Moura’s
attributes: “She’s very, very pretty.”
The mutual
admiration between the Rolling Stones and the beguilingly demure Miss Moura was
(and still is) obvious from YouTube videos of them rehearsing and performing
together in Lisbon
back in 2007 (click on link below).
Today in Portugal,
Moura's 'blues' could not be more in tune with this time of deep pessimism over debt,
austerity, unemployment and the future for the nation’s youth.
While her current
concert tour is attracting admirers of various nationalities, many in her
audiences are Portuguese emigrants. Over the past two years, since the country entered
its worst recession in decades, some 240,000 people have left to join the
millions of other Portuguese already living abroad. Moura’s music nicely
satisfies feelings of homesickness, nostalgia, fate - saudades.
1 comment:
Thank you Len Port. Great blog re Ana Moura. Not enough people know about her.
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