Portugal

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“Cartography of a fado” Raquel Tavares lives where her fado dwells: in the heart of Alfama. A heart traditionally near the mouth, in the closest binding to the feelings one can aim.

It’s this quarter (bairro) that casts Raquels’s voice. It’s there, by living it day and night, that she is and feels more like a fado singer. Those were the recreation societies that saw her sing for the first times, still a young girl. Those are the streets that know each step of her everyday. Those are the people who, weather they know it or not, are fatally bonded to each word that comes from Raquel’s chest. And each word sounds as if dragged out from her soul, disclosed somewhere deep inside of her and brought to the surface at a “house of fados”, to extinguish itself the next moment. Raquel gives them the greatest truth of all: the momentary truth, only valid in that place and in that moment.

It mustn’t be over than 700 feet from her house to that other house, the fado’s one, where she sings professionally every night. As it mustn’t be over than 7 feet to the neighbours front window, who asks her “how’s your singing going, miss?”. All this happens in the narrow alleys of Alfama, in which lives are little private and enter the next doors without wonder. It’s from that collective feeling, of a people in its maximum authenticity who lives everything in an excessive, dramatic and therefore passionate way that Raquel’s voice feeds.

Raquel sings what she sees, feels and smells around her, what she daily lives. And nothing fulfils her more than the real and touchable stories written by the hand of Linhares Barbosa, the fado’s poet who better told the tales of the people. But if Bairro quite naturally refers to Alfama, at the same time it lays to geography. An inside geography made of other streets and other alleys, other doors and Windows, that draw the musical path of Raquel Tavares.

From the little girl who sang for pleasure to the woman who only takes pleasure from singing. This record states a series of fulcral moments in the fado singer’s musical route. Only she has the key to open each of the secrets here contained, but it’s no longer a secret that Raquel Tavares, winner of the Revelation Award Amália Rodrigues 2006, it’s not only a voice which promises a lot.

Here, in Bairro, she begins to fulfil that promise.