Customer Reviews

Leva-me aos fados

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While Mariza remains the world popular star of fado, with her more contemporary stylings, another vocalist is attaining considerable attention. This fourth album of Ana Moura is her strongest studio session, with 17 excellent songs, most of which written by Jorge Fernando (guitarist and producer of albums of both divas, including this one). The package insert includes the lyrics and their translations. I happen to regard Moura's voice as among the best among the albums in my, albeit, small collection of fado. Her singing is not dramatic, but she conveys the sentiment of the lyrics. Like Greek rembetika, Portuguese fado stems from the harbor, outcasts, and lower classes, and its bluesy melancholia speaks of longing, loss, failed romance, and other sorrows. The tunes on this album, being recent, have a modern feeling and some arrangements of the ballads are popular in form, thankfully acoustic. Track 15, for instance, is very far from tradition, with group singing; indeed, the title of the song is "This is no ordinary fado"! The Portuguese guitar with its sweet, high metallic timbre serves as counter-weight to Moura's mezzo phrasings. Bass guitar and double bass ground the rhythms. This is an album to savor. In fado, sadness is bitter-sweet. A doomed love? Have some coffee, shrug, and walk into the night with a half-smile.

LOVE the Ana Moura CD! I highly recommend it to anyone who loves Fado! More importantly, I am especially grateful to the people at Amazon.com for all of the help and assistance they gave me when my first shipment went missing. Thanks so much. You have a great staff! Will continue to shop Amazon.com because of the excellent way you treat your customers.

Ana is a very passionate artist. I had the opportunity to see her in concert in Ihla Terceira in the Azors and she was worth every single minute of it.
Nice voice, nice presentation, very down to earth girl.

My introduction to fado was Ana Moura's album, Para Alem da Saudade, an extraordinary album which, I told a friend, is the album you'd want to play for someone if you wanted to define "melancholy." I can't consider myself an expert on fado, but here are a couple of things I think, to provide some context for what follows: I do prefer Moura over Mariza; and it's pretty clear to anyone who can hear that Amalia Rodrigues ("The Queen of Fado," as record after record proclaims her) remains the gold standard for fado (and was an extraordinary singer, period). In other words, I find myself preferring more traditional fado performances.

Moura, here, gently pushes at tradition, with arrangements in several songs that feel more open, less confined in their sound and structure than most fado does. And "Nao e um fado normal" sounds just like its title: it's a kind of fado-meets-jazz melody of unexpected but not-unpleasant chord progressions that, while it's hard to imagine the Queen of Fado singing something like this, certainly makes the listener sit up and take notice . . . and listen more closely to the more "traditional" pieces.

In short: New arrivals to fado need to know that not everything you'll hear on this album is fado in its most essential form, but it does provide a very nice sense of where fado presently is and might be headed.

This is not a typical genre I would listen to, but I heard some songs on NPR and bought the album on an impulse and now I have completely fallen in love with her music.

Ana Moura is one of the best Portuguese singers I have ever heard, I have almost all of her cd's.