21st Century Dharma Bum
By Brian Van der Horst
The Soul of Fado.
I was in sun-drenched
Lisbon recently, and had finished giving a three-day seminar on coaching, to
applause. Portugal's capital is only 33 euros and an hour away from Paris
these days. My sponsor took me to one
of her favorite places the last night, a Fado bar called A Tasca do Jamine.
I had listened to Fado records 40 years ago, and had
written about it in my folksong book; but I had never knew what it was until
the second lady began singing last night, and I began to feel this exquisite
longing in my chest.
Fado, if
you don't know, is for me, a cross between the operatic Italian popular song,
like "Ritourna a Serrento," and "O Sole Mio," and the best
of the country blues.
I spent some time with the singers, eating a gallon of snails boiled in wine
and spices, drinking beer, and navigating between rusty English, French
and Portuguese translations.
The bar was two-thirds full of professional singers. The rest were fans and
spouses. In this little blue-tiled shadowed bar, in the late sun of the
afternoon, they sang of unrequited loves, destiny, and turns of fate, sailors
lost at sea, and love of their city.
They explained that Fado was song for everyone.
Each stood up and sang with the 12-string mandocello and Spanish guitar players
when feeling moved them. Men, woman, and even one hilariously gloomy hunking
young lad with Down's syndrome that everyone cheered and adored, opened their
voices to the stars.
People don't just applaud the singers here. They shout, they hug, they kiss
each other, for listening as well as for singing.
Fernanda, one of those huge, pale ladies with smoky wise eyes, jet-black hair,
and a weary yet joyful smile that melts your heart is a concierge during the
day, and sings by night. A friend is helping her make her first CD. Nary a dry
eye in the house when she sang. Afterwards she hugged and kissed me for being
there with her. We talked and she told me about that feeling in my breast.
"Now you can really know Fado," she explained.
"That's 'Saudadi'. It's a word in Portuguese which is
untranslatable." But the closest we came to it is to say it is that
exquisite bittersweet pain you feel when someone or something you love is
far away. But you are glad for this feeling, because it proves to you
that the beloved exists, and that you cherish them, that they are real; and
that they will someday, like a sailor out to see, return.
Copyright
2007 Brian Van der Horst (www.bvdh.com).
All rights reserved.
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