WORLD LISTENING POST, by Alan Tigay – 09/02/2021
Carla Pires: Cartografado* | All Over the Map
Travel far and discover yourself: The idea has inspired literary figures and works from Camus to Kerouac to Cloud Atlas. The twist Carla Pires offers on her fourth studio album is assimilating the distant horizon not only into herself but also her art—taking fado away from its origins in Lisbon and showing how it becomes more world-wise and simultaneously more deeply fado. She comes naturally to Cartografado (Fado’s Cartography), having performed some 500 concerts in 23 countries in the course of her career. The album charts not just earthly topography but also emotional, imaginary and temporal pathways. Pires has an enveloping sound and she travels light, just her elegant, softly penetrating voice and a perfectly matched set of strings; her main partner here is singer-songwriter (and album artistic director) Amélia Muge, plus a superb cast of lyricists and composers adding French, Brazilian, Argentinian and Greek flavors to a Portuguese base. The title track is a lyrical odyssey, from the Himalayas of fado to its tropics and oceans, from images of kimonos to sounds of chorinho and morna, and back. In Tudo o Que Não Há (Everything Non-Existent, Pires presents a landscape of bitter love and departure without return. There’s an echo of Homer’s reddish sea in Os Vinhos dos Portos (Port Wines), comparing the grape to songs that take us on epic journeys. Words themselves become trails through silent dimensions in Alma Aprendiz (Soul’s Apprentice). Crossing the borders of Portuguese, Pires also takes fado to French chanson with a poem by Paul Éluard and floats comfortably into Spanish with Alfonsina Storni’s Date a Volar (Fly Away). In a stressful time when travel is more of a mental than physical exercise, Cartografado is a tantalizing reminder that music offers a way to find the world in ourselves.
*”Cartografado” is Portuguese for “mapped” or “charted.” Carla Pires gives the word a second meaning linking fado with the root verb “cartografar”— hence, the map of fado, or fado’s cartography.