Word: fado
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fado, sometimes called the Portuguese blues, is a centuries-old folk style traditionally used to express saudade--nostalgic melancholy. It's an ideal vehicle for the kind of voice that makes people weep into their vodka and tonics, and Portugal's eminent fado chanteuse, Cristina Branco, 28, has such a voice...
...recordings and in concert, her low, tremulous instrument is backed by a band consisting of a 12-string Portuguese guitar and a Spanish guitar, the traditional fado instruments, and a bass guitar. The 12-string guitarist, Custodio Castelo, is Branco's husband as well as her chief collaborator in songwriting. She presents him with a poem she likes, usually Portuguese, and the two of them craft it into song...
High-minded as fado may be in Branco's hands, the style had the rotten luck to be endorsed by the dictators who ruled Portugal for almost 50 years. For many Portuguese, the genre carried the odor of fascism long after a 1974 revolution restored democracy. "It took 20 years for [fado] to grow up again, to be civilized music again," says Branco. Perhaps that accounts for the sense that even when she sings of desolation, Branco's delivery seems animated by the pleasure of recovering something lost. For her listeners, the pleasure lies in hearing a venerable art form...
...shoulders, a dark headband holding them in place, clad in a simple white tunic and flowing white pants. His music is a stew of many ingredients - Brazilian spices, West African meat, European pop broth. Nascimento seems to view the world as his supermarket, throwing in his musical cart Portuguese fado, South African juju music and, of course, bossa nova rhythms from his native country. His first song popped and burbled with township jive, and the emotional high point was reached when Lo Borges (a peer of Nascimento's who hails from his home region of Minas Gerais) joined...
...time at Rock in Rio went. I'm still trying to find some sense in everything, find some trends, some meanings, some currents. Brazil gives and takes from the world. The rest of the world gives and takes from Brazil. Brazil took rhythms from Africa and fado music from Portugal and bits and pieces of other genres and came up with samba. Jobim took bits and pieces of samba and parts of the kind of "cool jazz" pioneered by Miles Davis and came up with bossa nova. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil took the experimentation of the Beatles...