Elis Regina - Biography

Biography

Elis Regina was born in Porto Alegre, where she began her career as a singer at age 11 on a children's radio show, O Clube Do Guri on Rádio Farroupilha. In 1959, she was contracted by Rádio Gaúcha and in the next year she travelled to Rio de Janeiro where she recorded her first LP, Viva a Brotolândia (Long Live Teenage Land).

She won her first festival song contest in 1965 singing Arrastão (Pull The Trawling Net) by Edu Lobo and Vinícius de Moraes, which, when released as a single, made her the biggest selling Brazilian recording artist since Carmen Miranda. The second LP with Jair Rodrigues, Dois na Bossa, set a national sales record and became the first Brazilian LP to sell over one million copies. Arrastão by Elis also launched her career for a national audience, since that festival was broadcast via TV and radio. For the history of Brazilian music, the record represented the beginning of a new musical style that would be known as MPB (Música Popular Brasileira or Brazilian Popular Music), distinguished from the previous bossa nova.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Elis Regina helped to popularize the work of the tropicalismo (Tropicália) movement, recording songs by musicians such as Gilberto Gil. Her 1974 collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elis & Tom, is often cited as one of the greatest bossa nova albums of all time, which also includes what many consider the all-time best Brazilian song, "Águas de Março". She also recorded songs by Milton Nascimento, João Bosco, Aldir Blanc, Chico Buarque,Guinga, Jorge Ben, Baden Powell, Caetano Veloso and Rita Lee. Her nicknames were "furacão" ("hurricane") and "pimentinha" ("little pepper").

She sometimes criticized the Brazilian dictatorship which had persecuted and exiled many musicians of her generation. In a 1969 interview in Europe, she said that Brazil was being run by "gorillas". Her popularity kept her out of jail, but she was eventually compelled by the authorities to sing the Brazilian national anthem in a stadium show, drawing the ire of many Brazilian Leftists. She was later forgiven because they understood that, as both a mother and daughter, she had to protect her family from the dictatorship at any cost. Along with many other artists Elis was living each verse of Geraldo Vandré's political hymn:: Yet they make of a flower their strongest refrain, And believe flowers to defeat guns. While her earlier records were mostly apolitical, from the mid-'70s on her music became more engaged, and she began to choose compositions and structure her conceptually complex live shows in ways as to criticize the military government, capitalism, racial and sexual injustice and other forms of inequality. Lyrics to songs recorded towards the end of her career carried overt socialist leanings, and in 1980, she joined the Workers' Party.

Her rendition of Jobim / Vinicius' song "Por Toda A Minha Vida" appeared on the soundtrack to the 2002 movie Hable con Ella (Talk to Her) directed by Pedro Almodóvar and her song "Roda" appeared on the soundtrack to the 2005 movie Be Cool.