Isabelinha | Fado on the Waterfront

For Isabelinha, music was everywhere in her childhood. In classical ballet, which she practised until the age of 17, or at home, where every day she would listen to jazz, blues, bossa nova, erudite music and fado. Very early on, fado was to occupy a place of its own in her life, becoming a kind of intangible world inhabited by all of her family: parents, grandparents, great uncles and aunts, and longstanding friends. Their own separate postcode played on the guitar, their own identity card written in song, coupled with the certainty that they belonged to something very special and much bigger.

It was through the voices of her mother and great aunt, always accompanied by some illustrious guitarist who happened to be present, that she had her first contacts with the great masters of fado: Fernanda Maria, João Ferreira-Rosa, Carlos Ramos, Amália, Maria Teresa de Noronha, Teresa Tarouca and Beatriz da Conceição. She grew used to listening to them, learning from them and intuitively feeling them inside her, without knowing that they would become not only the soundtrack of her childhood and adolescence, but also the major influences on her own career as a fado singer.

At the age of 18, she set out to sing the song that she believed belonged to her family. She is still at the beginning. For eight years now, she had been singing at the Clube de Fado, in Lisbon, and has been creating her own identity based upon her enormous genetic and collective heritage. At this concert, she will be celebrating the legacy of one of the greatest names in the history of fado: João Ferreira-Rosa.