Fado Brazil

"Why?", asks Mariza when I open our conversation with this admission. Those famously big eyes twinkle with challenge. "Explain," she insists. Well, most of the Brazilian records we receive at fRoots Towers are what you might call 'lift music': easy-listening, middle-of-the-road, and if you don't understand the language, apparently without a great deal of soul. And orchestras generally tend to not sit awfully well with soulful music anyway. How did she manage to defeat both of those things and make them work so well for her? For Transparente (see fR263), the new, Brazilian orchestrated album, has turned out to be her best yet - understated, warm yet passionate, a showcase for a singer who really seems to have found herself.

"You know, I think one of the things was to take all the material there almost done. All the fados to make this record I took to Brazil and I made a pre-production with Jaques, I took my musicians and I made Jaques listen to how they sound with only the Portuguese guitar and the acoustic guitar. And then I think Jaques felt the ambience and the soul of that type of music. But in the other way, Jaques is very serious when he works with music. He has a lot of respect for the instruments. He chooses the instruments with ceremony and uses them in a very respectful way. If you listen, for example, to the strings, they appear but they are like velvet. They are not there to show 'here we have an orchestra', we don't have that. Even the Portuguese guitar, the way he uses it is not like the way we use it in Portugal when we do a fado record: there, the guitar opens the fado, it's there all the time. He used the guitar appearance like... dating with the music. She appears and then she disappears again, and then reappears. And I was there all the time, always talking with Jaques and he was feeling the same thing as me. If I had an idea about what kind of instrument I would like to use I would say to him, 'You know I'm listening to this and I'm feeling that maybe here I would love to hear a flute or a cello,' and we worked like that, and the result was good."

"He was my choice. I've known his work for a long, long time and I was and still am a big fan. I had a dream that one day maybe he could produce just one song, not a whole record, just one song, because he's a very busy person, and I was afraid that if I invited him to do a fado record he would say no, for sure, because fado is so different from the music he normally works with. He likes to work with Ryuichi Sakamoto who is more classical. Then he works with Caetano Veloso, which is a completely different thing, and he works with Tom Jobim. So I was like 'he's not going to accept, but we're going to try' and I invited him and he said yes."