The smooth, romantic Brazilian beat that underlies much of contemporary jazz-pop in the United States has often originated with the music of Brazilian singer-songwriter Ivan Lins. A superstar in Brazil with a career stretching back to the classic era of bossa nova music, Lins gained fans in the United States and Europe as he collaborated with urban contemporary greats George Benson and Quincy Jones in the 1980s and launched an independent American career. His popularity, rather than declining as he aged, continued to grow, and in 2005, 35 years after breaking into the Brazilian music scene, he won a Latin Grammy Award for his album Cantando Historias.

 

 

Lins was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1945, but when he was two years old his father, a naval engineer, enrolled in a graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside Boston. It was there that Lins grew up, in a brownstone apartment near the Boston Public Garden, and American music made a strong impact on him when he was very small. "I was really a speedy child," Lins told Bob Young of the Boston Herald. "One day my parents said, 'Let's calm him.' They gave me these plastic colored records and I used to play and sing to them all the time." Among the records were classic American songs by Stephen Foster such as "Camptown Races" and "Swanee River," and tunes from the hit Walt Disney animated films of the 1940s such as "When You Wish Upon a Star," from Pinocchio.

 

Listeners to Lins's sophisticated adult pop wouldn't necessarily think first of Disney as a possible influence, but Lins pointed to the music of his childhood in explaining the structure of his songs. "The melody has a start and a finish, and I like to tell a story melodically," he explained to Young. "I think it's because Walt Disney's music used to be like that. ... because it was composed for children." After the family moved back to Brazil when Lins was six, he continued to pursue an interest in American music. He took up piano and listened to big band jazz from his parents' record collection, studying the arrangements of Pittsburgh bandleader Billy May. "My favorite Sinatra albums at that time were the ones with Billy May arranging," he told Peter B. King of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "You know, Come Fly with Me."

 

Lins released his own album debut, Quem Sou Eu (Who I Am), in 1972, and during the 1970s he recorded seven albums for the Philips, Polygram, RCA, and Odeon labels. He remained almost unknown in the United States, however, until he was discovered by producer and hitmaker Quincy Jones. Lins's music was recommended to Jones by Brazilian percussionist Paulinho da Costa, a veteran session musician. In 1980 Lins's composition "Dinorah, Dinorah" was featured on guitarist George Benson's top-selling Give Me the Night album.

 

Lins's recording and concertizing activities gained speed in his sixth decade of life, when most performers begin to coast. His 1995 album Anjo de Mim (My Angel) was released in the United States as I'm Not Alone, with new English songs, and kicked off a Lins tour that made the artist into a consistent American nightclub draw. Although he had been closely watched by Brazilian authorities during the country's years of military dictatorship, his mostly romantic lyrics escaped censorship and his Brazilian career continued unabated. Lins was also popular in Europe and Japan. The early 2000s brought several reissues of early Lins albums, and in 2005 Cantando Historias (Singing Stories) teamed a still boyish-looking Lins with a host of younger Brazilian artists. The album became the first Portuguese language release to win the Album of the Year award at the annual Latin Grammy Awards, and the subtle Brazilian tinge Lins had brought to a wide variety of American music was only growing deeper.