She could have been a dancer, had the dance school not thought that, at fourteen years of age, she was too old to start a great career. She could have been just a pretty voice in commercials, if someone had not discovered very early on that her voice did a greater service to music than it did to advertising.

Dulce Pontes, born in Montijo, Portugal in 1969, could have never gone further than a career within and on the scale of this small country in the extreme west of Europe. In 1991 she won the Portuguese National Song Festival and in the same year, representing Portugal at the Eurovision Song Contest, she achieved 8th place out of 22 contestants, and the prize for the best singer, with the song "Lusitana Paixao". This was the first time that Europe heard Dulce Pontes sing, and from that moment onwards, her voice no longer belonged to the Sunday afternoon television programs, where she sang 60s and 70s music in English, not to the audience of the theater where she set out as a singer.

It was from that moment onwards that her life turned around. Dulce Pontes abandoned her repertoire of rock ballads and set off in search of her own identity and repertoire. She immersed herself in the roots of Portuguese popular music, including the traditional "fado" - at the time declassified as defunct - and managed to reinvent something that seemed to be dead. Together with the Madredeus singer Teresa Salgueiro, she was quickly seen by some to be the successor of the mythical Amalia Rodrigues - the soul of Portuguese fado, and of whom Dulce confesses herself to be a great admirer. But this classification would prove to be limited: as later years and records would reveal, what she was doing was much more than just reinterpreting what had already been done. Her brilliant voice cannot be categorized within any style that limits her, it knows no national boundaries that can stop her. Her voice and singing and her very own style, for that reason, it dose not matter whether she is singing rock, fado, or a song from Angola: it is a style that is unique and unmistakable.

In 1992 she released her first album, Lusitana, and from the following year - when she released her second album Lagrimas - onwards, Dulce Pontes became a citizen of the world. Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Dulce Pontes was everywhere, singing in a strange language on the stage, and achieving the miracle of demonstrating that great music is a universal language. She sang in the "yes for Europe" televised concert, in the World Food Day concert organized by the FAO in Rome, in the United Nations 52nd Anniversary Concert in 1997, in Madrid. The album Lagrimas became one of the best-selling records of all times in Portugal, and one of its tracks "A cancon do mar", originally sung by Amalia Rodrigues, reached Hollywood in the film "Primal Fear", which starred Richard Gere, and whose producer, Gregory Hoblit, included the track four times in the soundtrack of the movie. She also recorded "A Brisa do Coracao" with Ennio Morricone.

This was followed by the album A Brisa do Coracao (1995), a double album recorded live, Cominhos, in 1996, and now O Primeiro Canto. There are also a series of experiments singing duets, where she has joined her voice to those singers such as Andrea Bocelli, or the Brazilians Simone and Caetano Veloso. In the last seven years, her life has been one non-stop digression, from concert to concert city to city, around the whole world. But she is not one to complain: "Concerts are the most happy and intense moments of my life.It is the sensation of having a gift, I have a reason for living my life."

And her gift never runs dry, neither in terms of her voice nor in search for new ways of interpreting traditional songs. Always a perfectionist, she has learned to accompany popular songs on the piano, to recreate them, and she has begun to compose some of her own songs. She is constantly searching for new tones, the sound of new instruments, however strange they may appear or however much they have fallen into disuse - even when they only exist in museums. She experiments with other voices next to her own, other tongues, other popular song traditions, and if we ask her to, she can even sing in Berber. To accompany her in her recordings she goes to the most diverse of places to find musicians that she admires and who she once heard play and has never forgotten. With taperecorder in hand, she traveled all over Portugal, to gather sources for her new album, O Primeiro Canto. For her, singing is a form of freedom, which does not fit within countries or frontiers of any type.

But what truly defines Dulce Pontes as a singer, the key for her success, is held in what she herself always says: "I am more interested in the feeling than in the technique". Only this can explain, for example, why a hall full of Japanese people - who do not understand a word of what she is singing, and who have no relationship with fado or Portuguese popular music - as her over and over to sing again the song that they have just heard. "At the end of the day," she says, "nobody is an impenetrable island". And the voice of Dulce Pontes sounds like the sea itself of all the islands in the world.

O Primeiro Canto, her fifth album, is her first recording after an interval of nearly three years. In spite of the fact that she has taken a long time to record a new solo album, she wasted no time collaborating with other artists such as Andrea Bocelli and Caetano Veloso. 

The three year sabbatical has also been a time for musical investigation, of new experiences with several sounds, forms and instruments. O Primeiro Canto was produced by Antonio Pinheiro Gives Silva, and in this occasion, Dulce Pontes surrounded herself with numerous friends such as Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the voices of María Joao and Waldemar Bastos and the trikitixa of Kepa Junkera. She is also accompanied by a string quartet.

(Source: www.worldmusicportal.com/ )