October 31 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts and Entertainment Source: Fado artist Ramana Vieira continues to expand her repertoire

Vacaville-based singer and pianist Ramana Vieira specializes in fado, the traditional Portuguese folk music likened to American blues, but she continues to expand her song list to include music that “people can dance to,” including that of Santana, Fleetwood Mac and Basia.

Another change includes the additional of two new drummers, Edward Blue and Steve Helfand, and recent major shows at the Caymus Winery in Rutherford and the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, she said in an email to The Reporter earlier this week.

Additionally, her new album, a mix of some new songs and her own fado-inspired compositions, will be released in fall 2025. Vieira also will travel to Madeira, the Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco, in August to perform and to record with a more traditional group.

Besides recording and performing, as she will Saturday in the Winters Opera House, Vieira also values her work with her church’s mission, which visited Fiji in recent months.

“I did sing with the bands but it was worship music — and do the Fijian people know how to celebrate and worship!” she said. “I call it, ‘I love Jesus music.’ I was elevated through their jubilee for Christ. We did mission work and they are very gifted musicians and beautiful people.”

Vieira said her shows have evolved “because of our amazing instrumentalist Vincent Tolliver,” whom she described as an “extremely gifted violinist musician.”

She cited a Vacaville Museum board member’s comments about Tolliver, who compared him to Papa John Creech, the violinist who played with the Jefferson Airplane in the 1970s.

Other bandmates are Jeff Furtado, guitar, and David Parker, bass, who, she said, also “moonlights” on keyboards while playing the bass with his left hand and the melody with his right on two different keyboards.

“It takes skill to do that,” said Vieira, also a voice and piano teacher, adding, “We also have fine-tuned our harmonies and so are featuring the vocals of more band members.”

“We have added some more Brazilian standards and we can play a great Santana tune or two,” she noted. “We have incorporated some Latin-oriented flavors and artists that we are now covering.”

In a previous interview, Vieira recalled a tour stop in Oregon and “someone screamed, ‘Freebird!’ (the Lynyrd Skynyrd rock classic) and my guitarist, who is very talented and versatile, huddled with our band for a few seconds and we turned around and delivered the impromptu request of ‘Freebird.’”

“The rest of the night of that concert we had everybody at the edge of their seats,” she said, adding, “I am sure they had no idea that we are not a ‘one-trick pony’ just like the song by Portuguese Canadian pop artist Nelly Furtado who wrote the hit, ‘I am like a bird.’ My band is not a one-trick pony and I am very proud of that aspect of us.”

For those who may wonder what the word “fado” means, it basically translates as “fate” or “destiny,” accentuated by melancholic and nostalgic sounds. As a genre, it can be viewed as the musical equivalent in Portugal of flamenco in Spain, tango in Argentina, and traditional blues in America.

The appeal of fado — pronounced “FAH-doh” — with mysterious origins traced to early 19th-century Portugal and enjoying a growing fan base in the United States, is in its melodies, the hummable part of each song. The music is alluring, passionate, plaintive, but also poetic and dramatic, often love songs of tragedy and longing, or “saudade” in Portuguese, added Vieira, a native of San Leandro and an alumnus of the American Conservatory Theater program in San Francisco.

References to fado in Portugal have surfaced as early as the 1820s, the music sung by women lamenting their lost men at sea, or of a hardscrabble rural or city life, but its roots may have Moorish influences, too.

While the genre has its traditions, Vieira calls her fado stylings “contemporary fado,” where the Old World meets the New, very much like the approach taken by other well-known active fado vocalists. They include Ana Moura and Mariza, all of them indebted to one of the greatest fado artists, Amalia Rodrigues, sometimes called “The Queen of Fado,” who died in Lisbon in 1999 at age 79. While some men also sing fado, it is best known today because of its female artists.

She has released several albums, among them “Sem Ti” (Without You), “Despi A Alma” (roughly translated as Bare Soul), “Lagrimas De Rainha (Tears of the Queen), and “Fado Da Vida” (Destiny of Life). They are evidence that Vieira not only pays homage to Rodrigues but also signals that she can compose original fado music.

IF YOU GO

• What: Ramana Vieira and quartet
• When: 7 p.m. Saturday
• Where: Winters Opera House, 13 Main St., Winters
• Tickets: $20 in advance, $25 at the door
• Online: www.winterstheatre.org/
  www.ramanavieira.net/Instagram and Facebook
• Telephone: (530) 795-4220