LOS ANGELES, CA- We tend to revere greatness at the intersection of artistry and craft. Art is pushed forward by the innovators and the iconoclasts but the tectonic shifts are typically achieved by those who demonstrate that they’ve put in the work to both master and respect the artform before going forth to bend and break it and explore new horizons. In this way, innovation of the form is born of love, a love rooted deeply in respect and admiration for the history and the tradition of those who established and perfected the form before us. Think of any titan of abstract art. Almost all of them have an early body of work that shows an exquisite mastery of technique that might not be as obvious in the later work that made them famous.
It’s fair to say that Mariza’s career is a case study in this archetype within the realm of fado. Fado is a music of love and loss and a beautifully painful nostalgia that could not exist but for the historical combination of these human elements in a port city like Lisbon, where the fortunes of generations of sailors, fishermen, and various ilk of seekers have ebbed and flowed with the tides, often ebbing more than they flow. It’s a history that echoes a particular chronotope – an intersection of time and place – that lends to fado a specific structure, energy, and identity.
And yet, if you go to Mariza’s Spotify page and hit play, you’ll likely hear hip hop collaborations and pop anthems before you get to something that sounds like traditional fado music. Innovation. Rupture. Departure. These are not unusual pathways inquiry and creation for Mariza. So, that begged the question: what was she going to offer the audience on this evening at Walt Disney Concert Hall?
The stage offered clues. Five chairs spaced evenly and quite far apart in a broad arc. Nothing else. No decoration. No lights. This austere arrangement, barely visible in the dark shadows of an unlit stage, suggested Mariza was poised to offer arrangements stripped down to the proverbial studs. No experimentation. No collaborations outside of genre. A return to roots. An inquiry into source.
And that’s precisely what was delivered. This was not rupture but rather repair. Tying together threads of a personal story told through anecdote and song. A story about opportunity, courage, fear, exodus, return, the weight of greatness, and both the beauty and burden of tradition. Fado folding over, inward, and upon itself with and through Mariza’s exposition and story of self.
With the stage still dark, a group of five musicians walked calmly and quietly to fill the five chairs. An acoustic Spanish guitar, acoustic Portuguese guitar, electric bass, percussion, and accordion.
With the hall remaining shrouded in darkness, the evening began with a beautiful burst of Iberian guitar. After a few moments, a single spotlight followed a towering figure in a sparkling gold sheath dress as Mariza seemingly floated to center stage. Mind you, Mariza stands a solid six feet tall barefoot. In heels and this gold sheath dress, she was a commanding sight to behold. The instruments drew silent and after a brief quiet pause, Mariza filled the metaphoric emptiness of the room with an a capella fado that dripped with raw and unhidden emotion. As the musicians filled in behind her, the acoustics of the hall amplified the sense that her voice and each instrument supporting it were piercing the outer boundaries of the terrestrial realm. It may sound hyperbolic but it really felt that way. There’s the theory in art history that the sharp pointed spires that adorn gothic cathedrals are intended to take the viewer’s eyes skyward and create a sense of awe, as if the spire has actually pierced the heavens and, by doing so, drawn the viewer closer to god. Mariza, standing tall and gold, was both a visual and auditory spire, drawing us upward in sight and sound.
What struck me most about these early moments of the performance was the way Mariza used silence to create both dramatic and aesthetic effect. Her deft manipulation of quiet between phrases and notes added power to their delivery and was masterful in building the effect of a communal transcendence beyond the room. In a space like Disney Hall, where you can hear the slightest movement of someone shifting in their seat, silence can become the instrument. Positive space and negative space in when properly balanced, juxtapose to highlight each other. Mariza seemed to do this strategically and the effect was elevating.
The effect was elevating and yet the evening turned out to be fantastically terrestrial. Despite the goddess-like profile cut by this diva, a statuesque gold conduit of sound literally shining light and sound from the stage, the purpose of this performance was to share a very human vulnerability.
Between songs Mariza paused to chat with the audience about the arc of her 50 years of life. Her speaking voice was raspy and buttery, which cut a stark contrast to the crisp clarity of her singing voice. When speaking, she was calm, confident, and controlled but unmistakably warm. At first it seemed like she just wanted to shmooze the crowd. To banter a little bit. Like Streisand or Sinatra. Charm the crowd with an anecdote or a bon mot. But it turned out to be much more. She was inviting us into the living room of her heart. She offered a window of intimacy to any of those in attendance who cared and dared to enter her world, to embark not only on the journey of her music but on the journey of her life. From an infancy in Mozambique to a childhood in Lisbon, Mariza shared the weight of talent and expectation, the burden of tradition, the fear of failure, the anxiety of belonging, the impulse to travel, the liberation of distance, the power of family, the concept of home, and the triumph of success and return.
Her stories, spoken in an elegant accented English, helped provide an emotional translation for the Portuguese lyrics of her songs. Not word for word but feeling for feeling. Winds pushing sails across seas; a sensorial journey as musical notes drew lines from Portugal to Mozambique to Angola to Brazil; lines originally traced by travelers (willing and unwilling) that sailed to and from the Iberian ports that birthed the genre of fado.
Her blend of gravitas and confident vulnerability made a world class concert hall feel like a smoky Lisbon bar. There was no need to describe or translate what a “taverna” is when she could simply make you feel it.
She is a pro who has harnessed a talent and knows precisely how to use it. Even without a microphone, she could blow the roof off the hall, backing up her adorably arrogant claim that she wanted to be the most followed Portuguese artist on Instagram, “right next to Cristiano Ronaldo.” A playful reminder that unbridled ego is part of our humanity and not always something to be ashamed of.
Of course, the pomposity of such a statement was undermined by the raw intimacy of the evening as she paused between songs to share existential meditations on life, death, love, and perhaps most importantly, self-love. Here was this artist, a maestro of her craft, not quite peerless but pretty close, relating the ways in which she often felt what some might call “less than.” In part, this doubt and self-criticism was because she was a prodigy. She could sing so well that she was expected to be not just the best fado singer but its torch bearer. But to achieve that feat, she had to leave Portugal behind. Thus she described moving to Brazil, travelling, experimenting with different styles of music, free from the crushing weight of expectation and tradition, free to develop her own relationship with music and ultimately with fado. And only then, after making this journey, did she feel the freedom to come home.
Woven together, her stories – as told on this stage by the woman in gold – had an oddeseyian quality that felt somewhat epic. And like any myth, her stories were rooted in elements of the human condition that were strikingly universal. Perhaps most powerful of those elements was the aforementioned notion of self-love. Once she discovered a true love for herself, she discovered that she had always been home. She didn’t need validation from the gatekeepers of the fado tradition. She needed validation from herself. Once she found that, no one could deny her talent. But without the journey, she may not have made that discovery. Which I believe is a part of fado itself. Her story was the artist reflecting the art, reflecting the artist.
The challenge of fado is to take it out of the taverna. It’s so intimate, so nostalgic, so sorrowful and raw. Bringing that emotion to scale at a global level is a herculean task for even the most talented. So perhaps it was her movement through geographic space and her physical departure from Portugal that allowed Mariza to reach back and then pull the most intimate elements of fado from their origins in the taverna and bring them to the world.
Whether home is a concept or home is a place, it’s always there. But how do we appreciate it and really truly understand what it means to us if we never leave?
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