Cristina Branco reviewed
Cristina Branco
Old Town School Of Folk Music, Chicago
Saturday, March 4, 2006
There probably aren’t too many correlations you can draw between basketball and the Portuguese music style called fado, but on Saturday there was one.
Modern sports don’t allow much room for folk heroes or stories, anything in the ESPN era suffers under the weight of hyper-analysis and is often reduced to statistics. But one Michael Jordan provided came during the 1998 NBA Finals, willing the Chicago Bulls to win despite suffering from the flu. And no one knew Jordan was ill until after the game.
Now, what the hell does this have to do with fado? On Saturday, Cristina Branco did let the audience know she had been battling the virus, and she may have even caught it in Chicago. But if she hadn’t said anything, no one would have been the wiser. Ah, synergy.
Fa¡do is an exotic form of folk music because it’s so cosmopolitan. Portuguese sailors contributed greatly to it by combining Brazilian and Caribbean flavors with Lisbon’s teeming pot of European, Latin, Arab, Gypsy, and North African culture. Suitably, themes in fado are fairly focused on universalities of love, longing, loneliness, and layman’s existentialism. Yet Branco, if you can detract from her commanding interpretations, is exotic to it because she’s refined and not enough of a mutt to lend her selections authenticity. As fado’s youngest and brightest international attraction, you could say she’s its Celine Dion.
But she also carries with her a freshness or joie de vivre than more traditional practitioners can muster; Branco is a vocalist first and a fadoist second. Choosing tracks mainly from her most recent album, Ulisses (Decca), she exploited her range with an A/B performance, in which ballads were followed by (what I’ll shorthand) Portuguese shanties. “Sete Pedanos de Vento” and its light oom-pah beat was easily the highlight of the early portion of her set, although she was trumped at a personal intermission by her band, which let loose a blistering Mediterranean instrumental.
When she returned, however, she reclaimed her place on the marquee with her unusual but successful cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case Of You.” Though she didn’t end her night on that, citing an uncomfortability of not closing in fado, it nonetheless showed a proclivity to expand the genre. And that’s what its practitioners bind themselves to. Folk heroes as well.
— Steve Forstneger
Category: Live Reviews, Weekly
