Canto & variations is a fusion of musical styles that is based on the Portuguese guitar. It's a genre that prints a melodic evolving at the instrument itself by making a deliberate break from fado. It is a breath of fresh air as they defined then selves. A new sound sideways from the traditional Portuguese music.

Why the choice of Coimbra guitar?
Angelo Correia: It's a long story. I began to study science in college and in the meantime came the opportunity to join a group of fados in the academy for several reasons that don’t need to be the point out I made my debut as a singer, but I wasn’t good enough, so, I started in classical cord instrument. My interest in Coimbra guitar came when I heard the first chords and when they offered me my first guitar. Let's say it was love at the first note. From the moment I started playing, I had classes and I never quit.

You started playing guitar in college, before that you had no musical education? You were very self-taught in the whole process?
AC: No, no. I had about a year and a half of Portuguese guitar lessons. Everything else was learned by me because I play for five years.

One of the issues blog in the Singing & Variations is that you want to break away from fado, why?
AC: We were initially a group of fado of Coimbra, very traditional, with the cap and gown, with the academic costume. We need to break out of the traditional aspect came up with the entrance of the violin in our group, as musician he’s very peculiar, he goes well beyond this classical training. He managed to grab the project that we proposed and transforms it. We have many songs that remain, so to speak, much because of him.

He also composes for the group is that?
AC: Yes, all the arrangements for the violin were made based on his own compositions.

However you also compose, I was listening to creation I and II and we see that the influence of traditional Portuguese music. How does someone who does not have any musical training can already write scores?
AC: This is a more complicated story. I do not have any musical background, except informally. I started because I like it. As I learned, I study. It's a very self-taught process. When you hold and handle your instrument, you'll know it better and you'll hear great music. No doubt that's the secret. My compositions have an influence of Portuguese music, for I have heard a lot Carlos Paredes. Never left out the traditional and the group "suffer" this descent also, let’s just say we reinvented music in our way. A person begins to write, when you know your instrument well, when you lose a lot of time with him.

So if you play more or lease for 5 years, you started composing when?
AC: At about three and a half years ago, I composed a fado and wrote two songs. The Portuguese guitar compositions have only two years.

The way they approach the Portuguese guitar, the mixture of different musical styles, are not interpreted as insults by the purists?
AC: I have to influence of a man named Octavio Sergio that has the same age as Carlos Paredes, and when he composed was also heavily criticized by purists, including Artur Paredes came to tell his that their musical scores were very good, but they were twenty years ahead of its time. Now, I'm enjoying these variations, flying from the traditional and I’ve received negative criticism from purists, the old men from Restelo as I call them. Moreover, people who listen, arrogate that my work is not to put aside everything else, but assume it's a genre that this absorbing the traditional and evolving. The key to our success is that the public always see our music as an evolution.