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."

Born in 1945 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; grew up in Cambridge, MA.

Address: Booking--Ted Kurland Associates, 173 Brighton Ave., Boston, MA 02134
Website: http://www.ivanlins.com