How Lisbon’s Club Scene Encouraged Ana Moura To Embrace Her Angolan Heritage
This Fadista is guiding her tradition into fresh arenas...
Fado singing is often described as the soul of Portuguese music. Originating in the 1820’s, it emerged from the bohemian districts of Barrio Alto and Alfama. Popularised by the likes of Maria Severa, it’s now traditionally sung in blue and white tiled cafes, the melancholic music spilling out onto Lisbon’s winding streets, telling tales of loss and longing.
What I’ve just described in no way resembled the atmosphere of the Islington Assembly Hall when I walked into it last Thursday. I was there to see Ana Moura, a fadista who has already revitalised the genre for her generation and sold one million records worldwide. Ana stood centre stage, dressed in a sparkly red two piece with matching elbow length gloves. Her dancing was hypnotic and the crowd moved along with her, voices raised in solidarity and celebration.
This change of atmosphere is potentially due to Ana’s decision to embrace ‘Novo Fado’ on her new album Casa Guilhermina. Named after her grandmother, it’s a celebration of everything she passed on to Ana; music, her feminist ideals, and most importantly, her heritage. Reflecting this, the release mixes sounds you’d find in fado classics with African music genres like semba and kizomba and Brazilian inspired sounds like samba and chora.
When I spoke to Ana about this sonic departure she told me how her post-lockdown eagerness for adventure had prompted her to explore new parts of Lisbon’s nightlife.
“I just fell in love with parties like Na Surra and Noite Principal,” she tells me, naming institutions well known for celebrating Afro-portuguese music. This is a rich and varied genre has been growing for the last 60 years, with the likes of General D and Buraka Som Sistema bringing it international attention in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In fact, Ana has actually enlisted Sistema member Branko as a collaborator on the album, and also featured Kuduro artist Pedro Da Linha signed to Buraka’s Enchufada label.
Lisbon’s club scene is now taking this genre one step further and creating spaces of inclusion and freedom for DJs, with more representative line-ups changing the types of sounds people are hearing in clubs. It allows people like DJ Marfox, who mixes dubstep and grime with funaná, tarraxinha and kuduro, to experiment. “It allows people to discover sounds that wouldn’t otherwise be possible”, says Ana. “Systemic racism is still very much felt in our music industry, but these kinds of nights show that change is happening. The musicians who were relegated to the suburbs are now finally being placed on platforms that they never were before.”
Being around this experimental atmosphere, Ana was inspired to delve deeper and apply these sounds to fado music. “The musical language was so different from what I was used to. You could hear the heritage of Cape Verde and Angola coming through,” she tells me. “So in a way, I heard my own story reflected in this, and I identified with it.”
na’s mother is Angolan, with her own great-grandmother coming to Portugal from the Mucubal tribe in Southern Angola after the revolution. “I was born in Portugal but was always surrounded by stories about Angola”, she tells me. “Since I was a little girl, my cousin and I would always listen to and dance to a lot of Angolan music in our house and at family gatherings.”
These memories are encapsulated in her track “Mázia”, which is clearly a crowd-favourite as it formed her much demanded encore at her London show. An ode to these memories with her cousin, she invited a classical Angolan musician Paulo Flores to feature on the track and used traditional semba instruments. “Then when the producers likePedro da Linha got involved, they brought the more electronic sounds and made those instruments sound different,” she says.
I ask her why she believes this album, which could have angered fado purists, has instead been received so positively. “I believe it works because it’s done with passion and honesty,” she says. “The countries where these musical styles originated from have histories that have intersected, with tragic consequences. The results of this perpetuate and manifest themselves differently within each of us.”
This manifestation, and connection to her heritage also encouraged Ana to do something she’s never felt comfortable doing before: write her first original songs. “There is an enormous respect for poets in the history of Portuguese fado, but a ‘respect’ that can feel like one could never re-interpret or re-imagine what’s at the core of the genre,” she tells me. “These songs give us a feeling of not being good enough to ever write something as perfect. But of course, this has to be fought. There will always be new forms of expression and this absence of limits has a lot of beauty when we manage to free ourselves.”
The release of this album also came at a time which was very significant for Ana, as she has just become a mother. Taking into consideration how her relationship with her grandmother inspired such a formative musical experimentation, I ask Ana how she feels this new familial relationship will affect her music. “Being a mother made me feel that I am the one who dictates the rules of my game. I feel that motherhood has kind of set me free. I’m not just made of one material, and that makes me want to explore all the ways of existing, with all the various layers that make me who I am as a person.”
It seems that Ana’s journey of sonic self-discovery has only just begun, and as she continues down this road of self-expression and experimentation, Lisbon’s clubbing scene seems the perfect space to support her.
Originally posted in Clash Magazine, February 14th 2023