Fado Brazil

Mariza's background, born in Mozambique of a Portuguese father, is well known, but I'd missed out on the fact that she spent six months living in northeast Brazil when she was 21. "I was crazy at that time, and I decided to live in Brazil. I was living in a cruiser boat, singing and having fun. I wanted to see the world. I was very curious about Brazil because my father lived in Brazil for a while. He lived in Brazil, in Macao, in Venezuela, in Argentina, in Bogota. He started travelling when he was 15. He was a man who really enjoyed to know the world. As you know, we had a regime in Portugal, and I think that made people try to run from Portugal and try to see other places. And my grandfather lived in Venezuela for 36 years. He was an immigrant. My father went to live in Venezuela, then he started travelling in all the places he could."

"I think that influenced me a lot. For example, my father is a man who really loved fado, and I remember all the time seeing my father listening to fado, mostly sung by male voices, because those were the voices he liked. But from the other side I had my mum. I was listening to world music without knowing. She was listening to music from the Antilles, from Argentina, music from Cape Verde. I knew Cesaria Evora when Cesaria was not a big star, you know. And Bana, who is another Cape Verdean male singer; music from Zimbabwe; Miriam Makeba. And then my mum used to listen to jazz sung by black voices, usually Nina Simone. Now I know why she was listening to Nina Simone, because since Nina Simone died I was reading things about her, and I was thinking that maybe my mum feels connected with the ideas of Nina Simone. So I was surrounded by completely different styles of music. In one way I have my father with fado, but on the other I have my mum with a completely different musical world to explore. So I think that influenced me a lot."

I'd been intending to ask whether she thought that the experience of sharing stages with so many different kinds of musicians from around the world since being propelled into this thing called the world music scene had an effect on her, but it sounds like the diversity of musical experience was already there.

"Yeah, but it still affects me for sure. You know, in the last two years I've grown up a lot. I'm so mature. I look to music in a completely different way. You know that thing which people like to do, to put names on things: 'this is tango', 'this is rebetika', 'this is morna'. At the end I looked at all of those things like... music, pure music. It doesn't matter if you put a name, it's music. And that's what I feel that I did on this record. I'm not thinking any more about fado, I'm thinking about music. I think that only happened because I started seeing and listening to completely different people, and observing completely different cultures, and feeling different things."

I wondered if she found that observing the way other people regarded their cultures had made her pay more attention to her own? "Yes. Yes. At this moment, I'm really conscious about my people, even myself, you know? I'm conscious that I'm a mixed person and I have two cultures to explore. One is the Portuguese one. The other one is the African one which I can't forget because my mum's always there and she's showing things from Africa. But at the same time I have another culture growing inside of me with this global thing which I'm observing all the time. I see completely different people, I share stages with African musicians, and music from the north of Europe and music from China, and you are observing all of that and unconsciously it's like a tattoo, you know, appearing on your skin. 'Oh, oh, why is that here?' and suddenly at the end you feel like 'Oh my God, all of these things are surrounding me all the time and they are here in my head' and they appear in the things you do, they appear in your work."