The queen of Portuguese fado brings her soul-cleansing music to the Sunset Center.

Fado means fate and is a sign of all those things that break you and build you in life. You can cry about it or – as residents of Lisbon have been doing since the 19th century – you can sing out your worries and dance out your heartbreak. Fado is guaranteed to clean your melancholy away.

“That’s why you see Portuguese people laughing all the time,” said fado star Marisa dos Reis Nunes ComIH, who goes by the stage name Mariza, in a 2007 documentary by Simon Broughton. The Portuguese have fado for national soul-cleansing; for all the men that went to the sea and never returned; for the sadness of a setting Portuguese Empire, the first global sea power that probed the Atlantic Ocean.

Popularized in the tavernas of Lisbon, fado has been always mournful and fatalistic. And the emotion can transcend language – “You don’t have to understand what I sing,” Mariza said in the documentary. “You will feel the emotions anyway.”

Mariza, who was born in Mozambique, has been singing fado since she was a child, becoming a local legend even before she recorded her first album, urged by friends. Fado em Mim was released in 2001 and it was a domestic hit (triple platinum album).

Three years later, Mariza and the new wave of fado went international after she performed “A Thousand Years,” the informal anthem of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, with Sting.

In 2007, Mariza was nominated for a Grammy Award for her fourth album Concerto em Lisboa.

A year later Mariza recorded Terra with such hits as Beijo de Saudade in a duet with Cape Verdean singer and musician Tito Paris, who made Portugal his home. Her most recent album is 2020’s Canta Amalia, which peaked at No. 1 on the Associação Fonográfica Portuguesa chart.

Both the old and new songs will sound lovely in the Sunset Center, where the queen of Portuguese blues will perform on Oct. 11.

One of the essentials of fado is a Portuguese guitar. According to Mariza, it sounds different, sweeter than the Spanish one. It is also smaller, has a rounder shape and 12 steel strings. Its history connects contemporary Portuguese musicians to their ancestors, cítole-playing troubadours, in Portugal since the 13th century, and minstrels of the Renaissance period.

MARIZA performs at 7:30pm on Tuesday, Oct. 11. Sunset Center, San Carlos and 8th, Carmel. $74-$94. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org.