Mio Matsuda

Japanese musicians often go abroad for their musical experience and education. Most musicians head to jazz colleges, Latin drum workshops or to busk on the streets of New York, but Mio Matsuda took an entirely different direction—the casa de fado of Lisbon. There, she learned the magical music of fado, Portugal's saddest and most vital music.

Close in feeling to musical forms like flamenco, chanson and the blues, fado is a music that is rare in Japan, but Matsuda just might change that. Her sense of the music is profound and is well captured on her recent CD "Atlantica." Not satisfied with resting inside the boundaries of fado's strict traditions, Matsuda also spices her music up with rhythms and melodies from Cape Verde and from Brazil.

A thoroughly delightful person to talk with, Matsuda laughs naturally and comfortably. She seemed to be taking pleasure in every question and thinking carefully about every answer during an interview at her record company's office. Unlike most Japanese, she waves her hands excitedly, like Portuguese and Brazilians do, to emphasize her points. Speaking in clear and comfortable English, (one of several foreign languages for her), she spoke about her musical travels that led to her first CD and current performances in Japan.

When did you start singing, at college?

I was really singing everywhere. I never studied singing in a conservatory. Since I was a child, I loved singing. I was singing in nature, like kind of animism. I'm from the countryside. I grew up in a theater commune, a very strange place, where there was a lot of music, folk music and classical music. It was a performing theater and had an orchestra. The kids of the members lived together in a house, so you had to learn a lot of things. I then moved to Kyushu, but didn't do anything for a while until I was sixteen. I loved Joan Baez and all these singers, just guitar and voice. She was singing "Manha de Carnival." I loved that song, and it was the first song I learned from Brazil. I had Brazilian friends and they told me how to spell the words and pronounce them. Then, I started to learn Portuguese. When I was 18, I studied Italian and English, but I felt like Portuguese was mine, you know? Italian, too, I loved, but I felt like Portuguese was something that could bring me to Latin America, to Brazil. So, I decided to study from the music. I bought an Amalia Rodrigues CD.

Amalia's songs are always so sad.

Yeah, I know. But when she was singing in the 30s, she also had lots of happiness, too. I fell in love with that voice when she was young. It was so beautiful. So, I decided to sing fado. I learned by myself from recordings, and formed a band with a mandolin player. In 2001, I went to Portugal for the first time to really sing with the people to learn the culture of fado. I could do it, actually, and I could be friendly with the local singers.

Were they open to you?

Oh, yes, they were very nice. There were a couple others, but I was the only young Japanese person. I tried to study Portuguese on my own when I came back, and then I got a Rotary International scholarship to live there for one year. Then, I really studied Portuguese and learned to sing fado with all these people in Lisbon. It was wonderful.

What kind of places did you sing in?

It was a casa de fado, a fado live house. There were a lot of them in Lisbon. At first, I was singing all kinds of songs, like samba, because I loved Clara Nunes. I always loved those old sambas, the slow sambas. I always felt the relationship between samba and fado was very deep. Of course, it was born from the same place. And other people like Caetano Veloso, I like that sound, too. All of those, fado, samba, were born in the same era in the 19th century. I was singing fado in Portugal, so I could find that way for the music. I sang with many people, many Brazilians, mostly from Bahia, and also musicians from Cape Verde.

Cape Verde is very different musically.

Cape Verde is totally like island music. It was a vacant island originally, and the Portuguese brought slaves from Africa. They formed a very peculiar Creole language and very interesting rhythms, too. The Cape Verdian musicians played in their style, but some of them tried to play fado, too. I wanted that mixture, because I could feel all those styles and relationships in me. But in Portugal, I didn't see anyone doing that. Only in some events sometimes, would the musicians from Brazil, Cape Verde and fado get close. Just one moment, and then they'd go their own way.

So, they kept it more pure in Portugal?

Yes, too pure. I felt kind of sad, and felt like it was really kind of wasteful to not mix them all together, so I wanted to do that on my own.

On your CD, you mix a lot of those sounds together.

Yes, you need these kinds of variations. I lived in Lisbon and listened to only fado and it was very depressing. The music is so sad. I knew people can't live only with fado. Maybe Portuguese can, but I can't. I went to Cape Verde and was singing in three hotels on three islands with Cape Verdian musicians. I was making everybody dance with fado, putting it to caladero, the rhythm from Cape Verde. I was singing fado with all these rhythms, and people loved it. So,I wanted to do that on my CD.

So, other musicians were more hesitant to mix all those together?

There are some musicians who are very good at singing fado, but they have their own accent and their own style. They want to make their own things. I was an outsider, so as an outsider, you can see things more clearly in a way. I felt like I had the potential to do that, because I could see the relationships clearly. All these relationships were made by the ocean. So that's why I wanted to call my CD, "Atlantica." That's also the female version and I wanted to make it female. Also, Yamanja, the goddess of the sea, is feminine. Lots of things are connected to that. I wanted to be a woman who is watching the Atlantic Ocean, and a woman who travels the ocean, and a woman who plays for the goddess of the sea. For me, the sea was a very fundamental thing. I needed to stay near the sea because I really felt the sea in fado. Everything is mixed by the sea.

So, after Cape Verde, you went to Brazil?

Yes, to record. It was wonderful. I didn't want to record in Portugal, because there are not so many musicians who can mix all those kinds of music well and keep an open mind. Lots of musicians are still set in a kind of nationalism about music. I asked jose da sosa to record and produce my CD. We recorded in a very good studio in Rio. It was high up and we had a wonderful view of Rio. The engineer was very good and they really know how to make the sounds of Brazilian instruments.

The sound is so strong; you must have practiced a lot with them before recording?

No, I didn't practice much, actually. They are top musicians, and they are very sensitive. Some of them like fado too. It was like a musical experiment for me. In Brazil, even, there is no one who does this kind of experiment. And I wanted to show them that fado and Cape Verde music has a lot to do with Brazilian music. I wanted them to find out the way to mix it, and they did it really well. Brazilian musicians are very open.

The sound on your CD is very developed. Does that maturity come from your experience outside Japan?

I believe that each person has a mature part and a childish part, a wise part and a stupid part, everything together. It's a kind of chaos. I always respect the emotions, especially the emotions that keep going for centuries. And the Atlantic is a road that all these emotions traveled. Fado and samba have all these emotions, so I wanted to express all those emotions. The spirit of fado is emotion. The beautiful songs from Cape Verde and Brazil all have these very simple but very deep emotions.

You have experienced those emotions, then.

Yes, I think I really have experienced those emotions. Through the recording, through listening to other people, through my experience, through my memory from another life or something, I don't know.

In Japan, people tend to keep their emotions inside, but you are so expressive.

Well, I really learned that from Latin American people. Since I was 18, I had a lot of friends from Brazil, and I also had a lot of Korean friends. Koreans are very emotional. So, I always had a lot of these hot-blooded friends. I didn't like to keep my emotions inside, because you just get depressed. I was singing since I was a kid to express emotions. Singing for me was a total expression of my emotions, like prayers.

The words, especially in fado, are like poems.

Yes, they are poems. I selected all these beautiful and profound lyrics from Portuguese, Cape Verde and Brazilian poets. It has a magical sound. Portuguese is so beautiful, and in a poem, they really make magic. It opens my view.  In that one song I recorded, the lyrics are "I said goodbye and I died," right? It's just an unthinkable poem. It's so beautiful. I could feel all these emotions of centuries. I have to learn a lot more. There are so many things I don't know.

How do music and life connect?

Music is born from life and how you think of life. How you want to live, what you think life is. Music is a kind of medicine, too. It can give you hope, but can really express a lot of negative things. For me, life and music has to connect. I always had this idea since I was a kid. All of my songs are born from my life and my experience. I always sing without thinking. I have to sing, so I just sing.

Singing for Japanese audience must be different?

Sometimes I read the lyrics in Japanese first so the audience can catch the meaning. They love that. Lots of people can feel my emotions, so I'm always happy about that. For me the music always has to fundamentally go over the frontier of the language. In Lisbon, there were musicians from all over, but they don't really mix so much. In Japan, lots of people are here, but we have to try to live together. We have to admit that we can feel the same. I hope lots of people who speak Japanese or other languages can feel the same emotion that we all have. Maybe it's old memories. I hope people can hear the history inside. I respect the history behind the culture and the emotions there.

How do people react to your music here in Japan?

Some people say that through my music they can feel the life of the people that I met. And also people who said they feel a kind of cure from my music. It's like a trip, a cruise on the ocean. We have to dream, and we have to create. Creativity comes from dreaming, and imagining other kinds of lifestyles. In Japan, we very much need that.

When you sing, do you sing from a character, from your own point of view?

I think I'm like a traveler who collects all these essences. I have a Portuguese and a fado part of me that is very sad, and has to sing out all this sadness. But I have this other part of me that likes to sing and dance, and I feel like I want to make people happy. And I have a Japanese part that is connected to nature, and believes in spiritual things.

The rhythm of some music is very subtle and very moving and delicate.

The essence of fado is always moving. It's totally like emotion. At the time of Amalia, she changed the tradition of fado to sing like she wants to sing. The rhythm actually is quite simple. When I was in Lisbon, I learned from the local people how to take a breath and where to take a breath. In Japanese, it is so different. I was watching these very big women singing. I was trying to be that person singing. They were so big you could see really clearly when they breathed, so I learned from watching them.

What are your plans from now?

I want to try many things. I want to go to Brazil with another kind of scenery and drama and another part of me to record again. I want to go to Europe again, and to America again. I want to learn Portuguese better. I made this about the Atlantic, so next time, maybe, I want to go inside the continent, to the interior, to the other side.    

(Originally published in Jazznin, November 2005)