Singer finds her calling

As a teenager in the Portuguese province of Ribatejo, northeast of Lisbon, Ana Moura sang with a local bar band. “I was doing covers of all kinds of music,” she remembers, speaking in delicately accented English. “Rock, Portuguese music, soul, Brazilian, a bit of everything.”

It was a basic pop gig, but each evening Moura would also sing one fado, a dark, sinuous lament that is Portugal’s equivalent of the American blues or a Mexican bolero. And it is fados she will be singing Wednesday, when she comes to Santa Monica’s Temple Bar.

Oddly enough, Moura says that her shift to the more traditional style happened just as her rock career was taking off. At 19, she won an audition to make a CD with her band, and it was during the recording sessions that she went out with some friends to a bar that was hosting a fado session.

“I didn’t even know it was fados that night,” she recalls. “But my friends asked me to sing, and there were some guitar players there, and they invited me to go to a Christmas party where all the people from fado were going -- the poets, the musicians, the singers.”

Life-changing

Moura went to the party, and her singing caught the ear of Maria da Fe, an established singer who ran a “fado house,” one of the small clubs where the music is performed for aficionados.

“She invited me to work in the fado house,” Moura says. “And my life changed completely. I started to live at night, because I was working at night. And I met the producer of my albums there, so I was also recording in the daytime. I had been studying music, and I had to give that up because I didn’t have time. And my friends had a different life, they lived more during the day. So my life became only fado and the people from fado.”

The memory sounds a little bittersweet, but Moura says she has no regrets. “Of course, when I see photos of my old friends, I sometimes feel a little bit sad,” she adds. “But this was like my destiny.

“Even when I was recording my rock album, the producer noticed something in my interpretation. He asked me, ‘Do you sing fado?’ I told him yes, and he asked me, ‘Please, sing for us one fado.’ And I started to sing, and he told me, ‘That’s how I want you to sing rock, with this intensity.’ So I think maybe this was the only way for me, that it was not possible for me to do something else.”

Intimate setting

Moura is now 28, and recently released her third album, “Para Alem da Saudade” (Beyond Mere Longing). The sound is classic fado: just her warm, soulful voice and a trio of guitar, acoustic bass guitar and the 12-string Portuguese guitar, which sounds a bit like a mandolin or mandola.

It is an intimate, late-night saloon music that does not translate easily to the formal concert halls where fado stars tend to appear on tour. Indeed, though Moura graduated to the concert stage several years ago, she sounds pleased that her Los Angeles engagement will be at a small club.

“I really miss this,” she says. “Because I started in the fado houses, and there we are much more close to the audience -- close in every way, because there we don’t even have those machines, like the microphone, that also separate people a little bit from us.

“It is a beautiful, mystic atmosphere, and in a small bar it is very easy to create a similar feeling.”

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10 tonight, Temple Bar, 1026 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, $12, (310) 393-6611; www.templebarlive.com