http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qvr87le6fk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ElLSBx9Jo8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va1y4tg_s_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COy6qy2kgkY
Fado is a form of song associated with the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Coimbra. Though similar there are stylistic differences in both the music and the manner of performance in the two cities. Thanks to recent performers like Mariza, the Lisbon style of fado is now known more widely than it was. However Coimbra, which is a much smaller place best known for its university - with which the homegrown form of fado is closely associated - has yet to find its star and be raised above the local horizon. Perhaps this is because Coimbra fado is most often performed in the street, on church steps and in other public places rather than in private venues and therefore exists relatively free of commercial demands. I understand that musicians of the Coimbra school can however still be hired to serenade a loved one at a time, and beneath a window of ones choosing. If that doesn’t trump chocolates and red roses dump the ungrateful bimbo allegro assai.
Though there are various theories about its origins, the roots of fado are just as complex and varied as any form of music. It arose as a distinct form in the early 19th century and is said to be amongst the earliest of urban folk musics. Thematically fado lyrics make frequent reference to the sea, the fates of those away on voyages, and the yearning of those awaiting their safe return.
Thankfully perhaps fado bears little or no relation to flamenco, though some persist in referring to fado as, “the Portuguese equivalent of flamenco,” which is true in only a very limited sense. It’s a bit like suggesting that Morris dancing is the English equivalent of flamenco, or that flamenco is the Spanish equivalent of Mongolian overtone singing. However like much flamenco fado is essentially torch song material, requiring a particular haughtiness of delivery and a demeanor fit only for the most spoiled of princesses, at least of its female performers. Shirley Bassey, had her birth place been closer to the banks of the Tagus than to Tiger Bay, would have made a cracking fado singer; as it was she had to make do with the frocks alone. Another common and perhaps more accurate analogy, at least in terms of lyrical thematic content of loss and loneliness, is with the blues.
Though the most renowned performers on the international stage are nearly all women there are male fado singers too. Indeed the Coimbra school is traditionally sung only by men.
The voice of singer Carlos Ramos had a peculiarly plaintive character. I like his voice very much even though it does have something of the whining schoolboy about it. Actually, I’m sure it’s the nasal edge that gives it its particular charm. Though a far more limited instrument than either Mariza’s or Bassey’s, lacking both their range and power and consequently their drama, there is however something reassuring and modest about the tone of his voice. Above all he sounds honest and that is perhaps the substance of his charm.
It was early autumn, the beginning of a new academic year. I had spent much of the preceding summer traveling in Portugal, drifting; taking the scenic route from Faro, Lagos and Praia Da Luz on the Algarve coast up to Porto in the north via Coimbra. I’d occupied my time listening to a little fado here, looking at a dab of contemporary art there, sustained by concoctions of pork and cockles, tripe and beans, pastelade de nata that varied in quality from deeply disappointing to ambrosial, and an occasional tot of a delicious Portuguese brandy, Macieira. It had been a fairly aimless and lonely journey really, pleasant enough after the enforced sociability of the preceding year‘s teaching but, after more than twenty years of solitary traveling, I was beginning to realize for the first time that my own company was growing thin. Little did I know it then but marriage would soon be beckoning.
After Portugal I returned to Benghazi and my flat high above the narrow, bustling street of Via Torino, one of the old city’s busiest shopping streets with its strange mixture of carpentry workshops, green grocers that smelled of damp earth, boutiques selling wildly colourful, transvestite on acid diva’s dresses that the local women pour their ample curves into for wedding parties that are, sadly, forbidden to men; there are cosmetics shops too, and also an ice cream parlour where a quarter dinar buys you a vast frigid rainbow in eye-shadow pastel tones balanced on a sugar cone; the best pirate DVD shop in town is halfway down, set slightly back from its neighbours - and thus affords the Via‘s only few metres of sidewalk - there you can purchase all the very latest in six-months-out-of-date Hollywood blockbusters, or even a rare classic of the silver screen that must surely have somehow drifted here, like the flotsam on the rocky shore just three minutes walk away; there’s a cake shop or two, a small supermarket that sells the best flat bread on Earth and where, nearby, a discrete doorway leads to one of the few functioning Christian churches in Libya, the most Muslim of countries; and amidst all this is Shareef al Madjbri’s small gloomy cavern bursting at the seams with plastic goods, trinkets, kitchenware and a long lifetime of miscellanies that might not actually be part of the stock at all. I never dared ask for fear that his natural generosity and the Arabic tradition of hospitality prompted him to give me yet another gift. Above all of this rowdy, day and night commercial to and fro there are hundreds of apartments occupying the upper floors of buildings that are between two and seven stories in height and ranging in quality from reasonable luxury to near abject slummery. All of this, and so much more, in a single street no more than a quarter of a mile from beginning to end.
While visiting Coimbra I had bought two CDs of music for Portuguese guitar and, having settled into a domestic routine in Benghazi once again, it became my habit to listen to them on Saturday mornings as I went about my chores. The Portuguese guitar is a peculiar instrument, it’s not actually a guitar at all - my friend Mr Pedantic would have you know - more a mandolin on steroids, which makes it a member of the cittern family and therefore only a cousin of the guitar. It’s tuned high and always sounds to me as though the strings have been tightened almost to breaking point and, being strung in double courses, it is quite jangly too. In the wrong hands I fear it would sound like a cross between a demented ice cream van and guitar that’s been sniffing freely at the helium.
The two CDs were Carlos Paredes (1925 - 2004), “O Melhor de Carlos Paredes: Guitarra,” and a compilation of Portuguese guitar music, “Biographia Guitarra.” Paredes, the son of another renowned guitarist, Artur Paredes, was regarded as the great 20th century maestro of the Portuguese guitar and did more than any other musician to popularise the instrument abroad. He was also a composer, especially known for his film music. His is an album of instrumentals and illustrates his highly decorated style of playing; not for nothing was he known as “the man with a thousand fingers.” For my taste his playing is too flashy, too virtuosic, I suspect that I would really prefer to listen to the man with ten thumbs as long as he had as much musical talent as Paredes. On this point I‘m sure that Emperor Joseph II would have agreed, for there really are just too many notes. Given the bright, edgy register of the instrument, that astonishing torrent of notes sometimes sounds almost panicked.
For a while the compilation, “Biographia Guitarra,” just tinkled away in the background, little more than muzak that came into focus every once in a while between bouts of laundry and vacuuming. Though focused on the Portuguese guitar about a third of the tracks feature singers. One day as I settled for a mid morning cup of tea after an especially heavy session with the mop and bucket the voice of Carlos Ramos penetrated the atmosphere and I quickly became aware that I was enjoying listening to it very much.
He was singing a song called, “Minha Guitarra,” (“My Guitar”), accompanied by the guitarist Francisco Carvalhino, which is appropriate enough given the compilation’s title and the fact that Ramos himself was originally a guitarist, only taking up singing late in his career.
