Ana Moura @ Symphony Space!!

Ever since I bought her album this summer in Portugal, Ana Moura's "Para Além Da Saudade" has been on repeat in my car... I can honestly say it is my favorite Fado album of all time with its diversity in Fados and originality. I was extremely disappointed when I didn't get the chance to see Ana Moura perform no Porto, Portugal like I planned to, but 2 weeks in Portugal doesn't give you too much time to do anything. But finally on Friday I saw Ana Moura's Concert at Symphony Space in NYC!!

The concert was amazing and full of surprises... The venue held about 700 people that were completely silent throughout the whole show. Ana Moura's performance was 90 minutes and not long enough! The guitarists couldn't be human, especially Angelo Freire on the Portuguese Guitar. He was unbelievable and only 19 years old!! After playing a guitarrada he also sang a Fado with Ana Moura and it turns out not only does he play well but he's a great singer too! A few songs later, another surprise... Tim Ries, The Rolling Stones' Saxophone player with whom Ana Moura is working on the Stones' Project with, came out and performed a few songs with her. Then she sang an amazing version of Barco Negro with the bass player, Filipe Larsen, modifying the Fado completely, turning it into the best version of the Fado I've ever heard. She also sang Fado Loucura without amplification like they do in the traditional Fado houses in Lisbon.

In order for Ana Moura to sing all of the Fados I wanted her to sing from her albums she would've had to been on stage for another 90 minutes... But all of the Fados on her setlist were well selected and really engaged the audience.

After the show was over, it seemed as though all of the young Fadistas from the Tri-State area were there; Michelle Pereira, Pedro Botas, Michael Da Silva, Diogo Arsenio, and I. We all got a chance to meet Ana Moura and besides from being the nicest and most simple Fadista I've ever met, she is stunningly beautiful!!

Here's a video of Ana Moura singing her latest single "Os Buzios" with the same guitarists that accompanied her in New York:

Below is an article of from the New York Times of the show:

March 31, 2008

Music Review | Ana Moura

Sorrow in Seductive Adornment

By JON PARELES

Sorrow wrapped in guitar filigree, elegant romance with a tragic undercurrent — that’s the tradition of Portuguese fado that Ana Moura joins. At Symphony Space on Friday night she started her World Music Institute concert facing not the audience but a band member: Angelo Freire on guitarra (Portuguese guitar), the round, high-strung instrument that’s inseparable from fado. She sang to the guitarra, begging it to break the silence and save her. She was dressed in black, with a shawl over her shoulders.

Fado (“fate”), which arose out of Lisbon cafes to become the most prized music of Portugal, takes itself that seriously. Every few songs in Ms. Moura’s set, she sang about fado itself. When she decided, just into her 20s, to sing fado rather than pop or rock, she had a fado written for her: “Sou do Fado, Sou Fadista” (“I Am of the Fado, I Am a Fado Singer”), a ballad that she sang on Friday more as a confession than a declaration. For one song she set aside the microphone to sing fado unamplified, as it is still sung in cafes and fado houses. Her voice swelled to fill Symphony Space.

In its most traditional form, fado is a collection of established melodies for which poets wrote sets of lyrics — analogous, in that way, to early blues. But fado is also, more flexibly, a musical style and a mindset. Along with Norah Jones and Sheryl Crow, Ms. Moura was asked to record Rolling Stones songs for an album produced by the Stones’ saxophonist, Tim Ries. On Friday night he sat in as she filled the Stones’ “No Expectations” with the pensive resignation of fado.

Her own group was a bare-bones trio: just Mr. Freire, José Elmiro Nunes on acoustic guitar and Filipe Larsen on acoustic bass guitar. They were all she needed to create fado’s slow-motion ballads or light-fingered oompahs, topped with the scurrying countermelodies of the guitarra. It’s music that exposes every vocal nuance, and Ms. Moura had nothing to hide. Her lush alto voice can be smoky and hesitant or clear and pointed, working up to a tremulous insistence that hints at fado’s Arabic connections. She made each song a series of small dramatic surges: glimmers of hope, hints of sensuality, passages of melancholy, glints of determination.

Fado isn’t always slow and mournful. Ms. Moura’s version of “Barco Negro,” a ghostly love song made famous by the queen of fado, Amália Rodrigues, had a swinging bass vamp while the musicians tapped percussively on their guitars. Ms. Moura’s fado never forgets about the music’s past, but it lives in the moment.