Over fifty years have passed since the Brazilian public got its first taste of Ivan Lins: a gruff-voiced, seething intellectual in the white heat of a brutal dictatorship. Lins uplifted that dark era with some of the most sophisticated, melodically rich composing next to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s.
Today Lins is a grandfather with a discography of nearly fifty original albums, a worldwide reputation (after Jobim, he may be the most recorded Brazilian songwriter outside Brazil), and an inner fire that still burns. His reedy, raspy tenor trembles with the same passion it had at thirty-five. To Lins, the sole salvation of the world is beauty; creating it, he says, is his “life’s commitment.” In his work, melody builds and soars; certain phrases are repeated until they’re seared into the listener’s consciousness. His band breaks into tribal background singing of key vamps. Lins’s chord sequences are renowned; they form rich harmonic beds that push emotional buttons. His work is underpinned by powerful rhythms—funk, afro-Brazilian, samba. On keyboard, he drives the beat with his percussive left hand. In quieter moments, Lins sings with a still-boyish vulnerability and yearning.
In recent years he has released numerous legacy albums that revisit his huge back catalog. None of them is as sumptuous as this. Conceived by George Klabin, founder of Resonance Records, it features the 91-member symphony orchestra of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
The base tracks were recorded in 2022 in Los Angeles, where Lins lived in the early ‘90s. A melting pot of musicians surrounded him. Pianist Josh Nelson, born in Southern California, is an elegant mainstay of West Coast jazz; Uruguayan guitarist Leo Amuedo has played with Lins for over a decade. Cuban bassist Carlitos Del Puerto founded the Grammy-winning Latin band Irakere. Drummer-percussionist Mauricio Zottarelli comes from São Paulo state; he’s now a New Yorker. The symphony was arranged by the German-born, L.A.-based Kuno Schmid, whose work appears on over 300 albums.
Having produced Night Kisses, a 2020 disc of Lins tunes played by clarinetist Eddie Daniels and a string quartet, Klabin wanted to swath the composer, an idol of his, in this lavish orchestral coat. “George is very sincere,” says Lins. “He’s a person who wants to bring beautiful things together. Handmade things that have meaning, history, force.”
To spend an afternoon talking with Lins, as I did in Rio in March 2023, is to see a man who lives for those qualities. Day turned into night as stories tumbled out of him in Portuguese; they encompass decades of Brazilian musical, political, and cultural history. Lins scored his first hit, “Madalena,” in 1970, the year he began recording. It was popularized by his first major champion, Elis Regina, widely regarded as the greatest Brazilian singer of the last sixty years.
It was she who recommended that Lins team with a still-obscure lyricist, Vitor Martins, who would become the most important collaborator of his career. From there Lins met arranger Gilson Peranzzetta, who lifted his music to new heights; he also cowrote Lins’s most recorded song outside Brazil, “Love Dance.” In the early ‘80s, Quincy Jones got behind Lins, and his U.S. career burgeoned. He’s still astounded at the jazz legends—Blossom Dearie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Mark Murphy—who recorded his songs. When Dearie, one of his biggest fans, showed up in his dressing room at the Blue Note in New York, Lins was thunderstruck: “Wow, wow, wow… Blossom, I love you!”
Sophisticated as his songs are, he wants them to reach everyone—hence the rhythmic fun, the seductive melodies, the fervor of his singing. My Heart Speaks is an Ivan Lins vocal album; he plays on only two tracks. “I’m really an interpreter,” he says. “I learned this from Elis. She taught me how to enter into the text. My technique is to read it first, to discover the movement it has. The text needs to be treated like theater or a movie.”
RENATA MARIA (Ivan Lins-Chico Buarque)
This rhapsodic ballad tells of a goddess who rises from the sea and makes all of nature pale by comparison. Then she vanishes, leaving a lovesick observer to stalk the beach endlessly, desperate to see her again.
Lins first recorded “Renata Maria” in 2004 as a demo with no lyric; he played the chords and hummed the tune. Hearing the influence of one of his songwriting heroes, Chico Buarque, on what he had written, Lins dubbed the song a Buarquiana—a nod to Villa-Lobos’s Bach-inspired Bachianas Brasileiras suites. When Leila Pinheiro—“my best girl-singer friend”—asked Lins for a song for her next album, he sent her the demo. Pinheiro thrilled Lins when she had Buarque write a lyric. On December 18, 2004, he sent it to Lins as a congratulatory gift; one day earlier Lins had become a grandfather.
After Pinheiro’s album was released, journalists bombarded Lins with calls: Who was this Renata Maria that Pinheiro—who years later confirmed rumors that she was a lesbian—had sung of so rapturously? “In fact,” he says, “Renata Maria was a character created by Chico Buarque.”
Lins himself sang “Renata Maria” on his album Acariocando (2006); the next year he released a live version sung with Buarque and Pinheiro. In this new performance, the strings help evoke the story’s breathless urgency—the surging of the waves, the pacing up and down the beach.
THE HEART SPEAKS (Ivan Lins-Jane Monheit)
Trumpeter Terence Blanchard introduced this song instrumentally on his 1996 album of Lins’s music. A Portuguese lyric exists, written by the songwriter-poet Ana Terra, but the project for which it was intended—a record of poems and lyrics by Brazilian women, set to music by Lins—fell through. The English lyric heard here was written, at his request, by singer Jane Monheit. Lins adores her translation of his classic “Começar de Novo,” known to Americans through a salacious lyric by Marilyn & Alan Bergman (“The Island”) that disregards Vitor Martins’s poignant original words. Of “The Heart Speaks,” Lins says: “Jane wrote a beautiful lyric. It’s easy to understand what she’s saying.” The song is sung here not by Monheit but Dianne Reeves, with her robust, commanding voice.
NÃO HÁ PORQUE (There’s No Reason) (Ivan Lins-Ronaldo Monteiro de Souza)
In the mid-‘70s, RCA Victor signed Lins to a multi-album deal. But after an executive insisted that some of his advanced voicings were “out of tune,” not to mention his discovery of shady accounting practices, Lins wanted out. Chama Acesa (Lit Flame), a deliberately dark, complex album with low commercial appeal, was his contract-breaker. Censorship had brought out the anger in many a young songwriter, and in “Não Há Porque,” Ronaldo Monteiro de Souza, Lins’s first steady lyricist, spoke of Brazil as a battlefield: “The road of this life is a thing for the brave … On the corner I want love and I see evil present … I only forget when I have a glass of brandy.”
I’M NOT ALONE (Ivan Lins-Will Jennings)
In 1991, Lins, Vitor Martins, and Paulinho Albuquerque founded Velas, a classy independent record label. Among the albums Lins recorded there was Anjo de Mim. The title song went on to acquire an English lyric from Oscar- and Grammy-winner Will Jennings (“Up Where We Belong,” “My Heart Will Go On”). Lins recorded it in 1995 for the U.S. edition of Anjo de Mim.
It's sung here by a promising newcomer, Tawanda, whose first album, Smile, was released by Resonance in 2023. Winner of the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition as well as a Bistro Award, bestowed by New York cabaret professionals, Tawanda sings with freshness, poise, and innate musicality.
CONGADA BLUES (Ivan Lins)
A blues-flavored exercise in Afro-funk, “Congada Blues” first appeared on Terence Blanchard's The Heart Speaks. Lins hummed and growled on it wordlessly, as he does in this remake, on which he plays as well as sings. “Congada” refers to a ceremonial religious dance that African slaves took to Brazil in the 17th century.
E ISSO ACONTECE (And This Happens) (Ivan Lins)
Lins has written few lyrics, but he penned one for Paulinho Albuquerque (1942-2006), his most trusted record producer. Albuquerque’s wife had left him, and he was shattered; Lins gave him a comforting hand on the shoulder in the form of a song. “If love ends,” he wrote, “inevitably pain comes … This happens, but it passes.” Lins finally recorded it on his 2012 album Amorágio. In this new version, Josh Nelson accompanies Lins with his typical spareness and grace. “I’m crazy about Josh Nelson,” says Lins. “He knows it has to be a conversation, an exchange of ideas, of feelings, of spirit. He senses how an interpreter reacts, how he feels.”
EASY GOING (Ivan Lins)
Lins returns to Brazilian jazz in the nearly wordless “Easy Going,” a song he introduced on guitarist Romero Lubambo's 2002 album Rio de Janeiro Underground. He sings along with synthesized trombone while beating out the rhythm on keyboard; Mauricio Zottarelli adds a touch of samba.
CORPOS (Bodies) (Ivan Lins-Vitor Martins)
From their first collaboration, “Abre Alas,” Lins knew he had found a soulmate in Vitor Martins, a profoundly wise and poetic commentator on everything Lins cared about. In 1975, Martins tackled a dangerous subject: the murderousness of the military government. He and Lins wrote “Corpos” for Ney Matogrosso, one of the country’s most defiant singing stars. “But we never showed it to him,” says Lins. “I don’t know why … He was traveling a lot.” Lins recorded it on Chama Acesa; Elis Regina later performed it in one of her most political shows, Transversal do Tempo. “Corpos” references, in metaphor that evaded the censors, all the dissidents who had mysteriously vanished, leaving ghosts everywhere: “in the mud, in the silt, in the fever, in the fire.”
MISSING MILES (Ivan Lins)
Lins never knew Miles Davis personally, but in the wake of Davis’s death he wrote this sentimental portrait, which he recorded instrumentally with Germany’s SWR Big Band on the album Cornucopia (2013). Here he hums in unison with Leo Amuedo’s guitar. The muted trumpet is played by Randy Brecker, the staggeringly prolific five-time Grammy-winner.
RIO DE MAIO (Ivan Lins-Jane Monheit)
Lins recorded this love letter to Rio on Jobiniando (2001), an album that combines Jobim songs with Lins’s own Jobim-inspired originals. Six years later he sang it in Portuguese with Jane Monheit on her album Surrender. Subsequently he invited her to write the English lyric that she premieres here. It closely follows the original words by Celso Viáfora, an esteemed songwriter-singer from São Paulo. Lins’s music is lush, surging, full of modulations and harmonic shifts, and kaleidoscopic in form, much like the experimental soundscapes Jobim composed in the ‘70s.
NADA SEM VOCÊ (Nothing Without You) (Ivan Lins- Celso Viáfora-Ivano Fossati)
Between 1999 and 2002 Lins made four albums for the short-lived São Paulo label Abril Music. A Cor do Pôr-do-Sol (The Color of Sunshine) contains one of several songs he wrote with the Italian rock star Ivano Fossati (Lins has performed a fair amount in Italy). Celso Viáfora also contributed. “Nada Sem Você” reveals the hopeless romantic that Lins still is: “Without you I’m useless, a black cloud at the end of the afternoon, hiding the sunshine … Beautiful thing, please stay.”
The composer who pledged undying loyalty to Brazil in his song “Meu Pais” (My Country)—“Me diz, me diz/Como ser feliz/Em outro lugar” (Tell me, tell me/How to be happy/In another place)—now spends much of his time in Lisbon, far from the violence of Rio. But his bond with audiences is universal. “I need to make the people feel like I’m feeling,” he says. “When they applaud me, it means they are seeing the same beauty I’m seeing. When they sing along with me, I feel I’m not alone.” His full tour schedule and this album prove that he has much more left to give.