LISBON, Portugal — Fado singers rarely find fame beyond Portugal's borders. The country and its traditional folk music are bound together so tightly it is hard to imagine one without the other.

But Mariza has changed all that. The 32-year-old's catchy melodies and foot-tapping tunes are drawing sellout crowds in Portugal for fado, and her modern take on the centuries-old form is grabbing foreign fans, too.

"Until recently, people had said for years that fado was a minor form,'' Mariza said in an interview. But she says that she sees fado as a versatile and robust type of music, like jazz, that can be forged into new styles without forfeiting its essence.

"Fado has no limits. Fado can soar,'' added the singer, who recorded her latest album, Transparente, in Brazil with Grammy-winning producer Jacques Morelenbaum.

Foreigners who might not understand a word of Portuguese are being seduced by the powerful voice and exotic flavour of this slender, willowy woman with honey-coloured skin and close-cropped, platinum hair.

Mariza followed up a Live 8 performance in Britain with a 15-concert tour of the United States, including a headline performance at Carnegie Hall in New York. A European tour will take her through April.

Fado traditionalists fault Mariza's style, disdaining it as a kind of "fado lite.'' They criticize what they consider frivolousness on stage (she once playfully lifted her gown to reveal comical multicoulored stockings, and sometimes swings her hips in an unfado-like manner) and find fault with her diction.

Those who believe fado should be listened to in sombre reverence grouse when she encourages the audience to sing and clap along.

Mariza, however, is tapping into Portuguese turned off by fado's tendency to brooding laments and sombre sentimentality, a lyrical fatalism that long evoked the temperament of a people who were among western Europe's poorest for centuries.

Though Mariza stays faithful to fado etiquette _ donning black shawls over ankle-length black gowns and backing her singing with three acoustic guitars _ she throws crucial new elements into the mix.

She chooses poems by Portuguese writers and invites modern composers to arrange them. That has enabled her to mould fado into something sweeter, more cheerful _ an upbeat celebration.

Her electrifying stage performances also owe a lot to a host of untraditional instruments she has introduced _ a flute, an accordion, and a strong percussion section which has brought some thump to the stirring African and Brazilian rhythms she has teased from fado's primitive roots.

Fado has its roots in the early 1800s in Lisbon's rough dockside neighbourhoods, home to sailors who plied colonial Atlantic routes taking slaves from Portugal's African colonies to its plantations in Brazil. Their sung stories and laments gelled into a musical style that borrowed heavily from the African songs they heard on their voyages.

Mariza was born in Mozambique, in southeastern Africa, when it was still a Portuguese colony. With her Mozambican mother and Portuguese father, she moved to Portugal after its 1974 revolution as a "retornado'' _ a settler _ forced to start life anew after the colonies won independence.

She grew up in the old Lisbon quarter of Mouraria, fado's heartland. Her African heritage, and months-long stays in Brazil as a teenager and as an adult, provided more raw material for her innovative style.

"I feel my African-ness very strongly,'' she said.

Mariza is unrepentant about her approach.

Fado can't be preserved in amber, she said. She compares the changes she and others are bringing to fado with the evolution of tango or Cuban music.

"Fado has to evolve, it has to move into the 21st century,'' she said. "The Portuguese people, the country have evolved. Fado has to do so, too.''