The Pleasures of Saudade

by Philip Graham

A year in Lisbon teaches you more than how to select a decent vinho verde. An ode to the uniquely hopeful, desperate music that’s missing from the usual American fare.

Why aren’t you listening to Portuguese music? The Portuguese are certainly listening to us. When I lived in Lisbon a couple of years ago, I visited apartments lined with shelves of American rock, folk, blues, and jazz CDs. One of the city’s main newspapers, Diário de Notícias, paid homage to the careers of American and British rock stars on their birthdays—David Bowie and Tom Waits, among others—with multi-paged inserts that included thumbnail photos of even the most obscure albums, accompanied by mini-reviews. And inevitably, you hear some of this influence in Portugal’s own rock and jazz music—and sometimes a dobro will pop up in the most unusual places.

So why don’t we listen to them? Well, there is this little thing called a language barrier, but that hasn’t prevented Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club from selling a bazillion records in the Anglophone world. Need I state the obvious, that Portuguese is a much prettier language than Spanish? And it is the sixth-most widely spoken language in the world, and the official language of eight countries, even if Portugal itself is a sliver of the western edge of Europe (two-thirds the size of Illinois), with a population of about 10 million.

More likely—and you wouldn’t be alone in this—you don’t take to the soul-drenched songs of fado, Portugal’s traditional, mournful music forged long ago out of European melody, African slave chants, and melismatic Arabic-style vocals. This is powerful stuff—fado means “destiny” or “fate”—but for some people in the non-Portuguese-speaking world it’s a music that verges on the emotionally operatic and whose performance rituals have begun to calcify. It’s a taste that requires some acquiring—me, I love it—but when the world-touring and world-class fadista Mariza hits the stage, everyone effortlessly basks in the saudade of her songs.

Like so many words that carry heavy cultural weight, saudade really isn’t translatable, but the English words of “nostalgia,” “love,” “pain,” “longing,” “hope,” and “despair” are all held in its gravitational sway. Even the least fado-like of Portuguese music is tinged with saudade, a particular, sweet ache that’s unmistakable.

And while Portuguese music has long been far more than fado, the country’s recent social transformation accentuates this even more. In the past 10 years or so, spurred on by Portugal’s climb to European Union-style prosperity, the citizens of the country’s former colonies—mainly Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique, but also Goa and Macau—have produced an unprecedented wave of immigration.

Now usually this level of social change will cause tension, and surely there are Portuguese out there who approach a Lou Dobbs Level of Crazy™, but in election after election the right-wing nationalist party barely manages to register a shiver on the political Richter scale. Most of Portugal appreciates this new multiracial and multicultural population, as it reflects the history of their once globe-spanning empire, and all you have to do is walk the spacious promenades of Lisbon’s vast and glitzy Colombo shopping center to see the emerging middle class of this new immigrant reality.

With the former empire gently striking back, Portuguese music has developed into a brew that’s beginning to be recognized as Pan-Portuguese. The country’s current feverish synthesizing spirit reminds me of the ferment of the 1960s in the U.S., when rock ‘n’ roll happily wove the disparate strands of our musical history and turned up the amps. Something is happening over there, but you don’t yet know what it is. Well, I’m here to help.

A good example of this recent, heady shift in Portuguese music can be seen in the example of Madredeus, a band that began fashioning elegant songs out of the tug between fado and chamber music in the mid-’80s. Madredeus has toured the world—though rarely in the U.S.—and is the subject of Lisbon Story, a film by Wim Wenders. But if you never heard of them then you weren’t devastated when the angel-voiced Tereza Salgueiro left the band in early 2008 after a 20-year run. Those in the know hung their heads—until main songwriter, guitarist, and guiding star Pedro Magalhães bulked up the remnants of the band to a 10-piece ensemble (with the unwieldy new moniker of Madredeus & A Banda Cósmica). The new group creates an unusual sonic universe that mixes violin, harp, and classical guitar with electric guitar, bass, and keyboards, plus a double battery of percussion. New singers Rita Damásio and Mariana Abrunheiro work double-time to erase the memory of the departed Tereza Salgueiro.

All of which might have produced nothing more than whistling in the wind if Magalhães hadn’t delved deep into his private well and composed his latest batch of melt-in-your-mind songs, many sampling the spirit of Pan-Portuguese music. The song that perhaps best captures the band’s wider reach is “O Eclipse (Habitas no Meu Pensamento)” (“The Eclipse [You Live in My Thoughts]”). This song begins with an acoustic-guitar riff that first softens your skull and then hammers it in as the electric guitar Spaghetti-Westerns an accompanying chord. And then those singers begin to sing.

Source: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-pleasures-of-saudade