From Rio with love

Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins occupies a strange twilight zone when he travels to the United States.

While he's never attained the level of recognition enjoyed here by his illustrious countrymen Caetano Veloso , Milton Nascimento , and Gilberto Gil , his music is much more firmly entrenched. Beloved by jazz musicians and embraced by pop icons, Lins has somehow flown under the American pop cultural radar, despite the fact that over the past quarter century, no living Brazilian composer's music has been more widely heard or recorded in the United States.

Nothing better captures the nature of his crossover appeal than the 2000 Telarc album celebrating his music, "A Love Affair, " and a related Carnegie Hall extravaganza the same year that featured a disparate cast including Sting, Chaka Khan, Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves, and Vanessa Williams. A riveting performer himself with a smoky tenor, pure falsetto, and strongly jazz-influenced keyboard style, Lins opens a two-night run at the Regattabar on Thursday with his working quartet, featuring percussionist Teo Lima , bassist Nema Antunes, and keyboardist Marco Brito .

"Gil and Caetano, they go much more on the pop side, and they can reach a larger number of regular people," says Brazilian jazz guitarist Romero Lubambo , a frequent collaborator with Lins whose playing is featured throughout "A Love Affair."

"Ivan thinks about MPB," Lubambo continues, using the common initials for the stylistically diverse current of Brazilian pop music known as música popular brasileira . "But he composes with gorgeous harmonies and takes some different routes with chord sequences that you don't normally hear. The effect is incredible, and that makes it very suitable for jazz musicians."

Lins says the explanation of his appeal to American musicians can be found in his earliest musical experiences. Though he was born in Rio de Janeiro, he lived in Boston from 1947 to 1950 while his father studied naval engineering at MIT. "Besides the quality of my tunes -- good melodies and nice chords, they always say -- maybe jazz musicians hear something familiar in my music," says Lins, 61, from a Rio de Janeiro recording studio.

"The fact that the first music I remember listening to was my mother playing Stephen Foster's songs and recordings of Disney songs may have influenced my way of composing."

A more likely suspect is the steady stream of recordings by Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra, and Thad Jones that his father procured for him on his frequent trips back to the United States. But Lins only started playing piano himself at 18, inspired by the great bossa nova combo Tamba Trio. He made quick progress, and first gained attention as a songwriter in 1970 when Elis Regina, the most popular and influential Brazilian singer of the era, turned his song "Madalena" into an international hit.

At the time, many of the artists who had gained notoriety in the huge televised festivals of the 1960s such as Vel oso and Gil had been exiled by an increasingly repressive military government. Lins was one of the last artists who catapulted to fame via the college-student aimed song contest Universitario in 1970, though he wasn't at all prepared for his ascent.

"I think I sang terribly, I was so nervous, but the song was really good, and people started to love my songs," Lins says. "I got very successful really fast. In three months I was known in the whole country, selling records and doing shows. I wasn't prepared for that at all."

Though his career waned after a few years, by the end of the decade he returned to the top of the Brazilian pop scene with his 1977 hit "Somos Todos Iquais Nesta Noite (We Are All the Same Tonight)," featuring a Vitor Martins lyric that offered a veiled though widely recognized critique of the military regime. Together, they created an extraordinary body of work, ranging from stirring political anthems to luminous romantic themes.

"We always had similar thinking about Brazil's political reality, but he still always took care with the lyrics he was putting in my mouth," Lins says. "At that time, we were against the government, and we had a very humanist ideology. That was a problem, because the dictatorship didn't understand this word, humanist."

Like his peers Veloso and Gil, Lins is widely considered a hero in Brazil for his resistance to the government. But where they are identified with the avant garde 1960s cultural movement Tropicalia and still boast larger-than-life personas, Lins comes across more as a regular guy. And when his songs started surfacing in the United States, they often featured English lyrics that lacked the power and poetry of Martins' s Portuguese.

By the time he released his first American album in 1986, Lins had already made a significant impact on American music. After Quincy Jones scored a Grammy with his version of Lins' s "Velas" (Sails) on his 1981 album "The Dude," the floodgates opened. Jazz luminaries such as Sarah Vaughan, Joe Pass, Carmen McRae, and Ella Fitzgerald began recording his songs, particularly "The Island," "Love Dance," and "Dinorah, Dinorah."

In the 15 years before Herbie Mann's 2003 death, the flutist adopted Lins' s music as more than half his repertoire. Jazz singer Mark Murphy recorded an entire album of Lins' s songs on his 1986 Milestone album "Night Mood," and a decade later, trumpeter Terence Blanchard made "The Heart Speaks " (Columbia), a ravishing album of Lins's music. More recently, vocalist Jane Monheit has demonstrated a deep affinity for his songs.

"It's not just that his music is so beautiful," Monheit said in a conversation last year. "He understands jazz from the inside, and I love his harmonies. But his songs embody that Brazilian spirit where the melodies and the rhythms just dance together. Ivan Lins is my ultimate favorite."