Grammy-winning musician keeps the bossa nova tradition alive

When bossa nova first swept the world in 1964, Eliane Elias was four years old in a musically inclined family in Sao Paolo, the perfect place for the music to wash over her.

“The Girl from Ipanema” was the big radio hit that swung so cool and swayed so gently. Bossa nova (Portuguese for “new wave”) was a bit of a fad in the United States, but continued to be the national music of Brazil, and an influence on many traditional jazz musicians.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Almost 60 years later, Elias keeps those traditions alive, with a string of Grammy Award-winning albums in both English and Portuguese and a nearly never-ending tour schedule that brings her to Atlanta’s City Winery on April 16 with her quartet (she’s on piano, husband Marc Johnson is on bass, plus drums and guitar).

“I am very blessed to have come from a musical family,” she says. “It was all around us all the time.” Her maternal grandmother Egle Chiarelli was a guitarist and composer, and her mother’s American jazz record collection filled the house with Art Tatum, Red Garland and Oscar Peterson.

Elias (her name is pronounced Eh-lee-AHN-ee EH-Lee-us), now 63, started playing piano at age 7 and showed signs of being a prodigy. (The singing came later.) By 17, she was collaborating and touring with Brazil’s most famous composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and his co-writer, poet Vinicius de Moraes.

“My mother looked for the best possible way for me to develop my talent. She took me everywhere,” she says. “When I was 21 I was leaving to go to New York, and my father said, ‘What? No way!’

“But she was my biggest supporter, willing to say, ‘Go, go to your life.”

Since then, she has released 31 albums with sales of 2.4 million. On some she sings Great American Songbook standards in English, on some she sings in Portuguese, and some albums are jazz instrumentals with Elias on piano. Her 2021 album “Mirror Mirror,” which was all jazz piano, won two Grammy Awards, including Best Latin Jazz Album. Her latest, 2022′s “Quietude,” is pure bossa nova, with Elias singing in Portuguese to gentle acoustic guitar backing.

On this tour, she plays a few traditional jazz instrumentals. When she sings, about 80% of the songs are in Portuguese, because she understands a song needs to be sung in the language in which it is written.

“A lot of what I do at my shows is storytelling,” she says. “To tell the audience the story of a song, and the translation. So they know what I am singing about, the context.”

She loves, for example, the story behind “Águas De Março” (“Waters of March”), a song that Jobim wrote in 1972 that weaves between lists of random objects adrift in a flooded stream and lists of metaphors for the human condition.

“When Jobim wrote that song, he was depressed,” she says. “He felt that his music was no longer relevant, that his career was on the way down. March in Brazil is the month of the rain, it’s the last month of summer. So the waters of March are closing the summer, but it’s the summer of his life, and autumn is starting.

“But this song became his most recorded, more than ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ and brought him back. He said it saved him seven years of psychiatric bills!” she concludes with a hearty chuckle.

Elias recently returned home to New York after an extended visit to her homeland. “I love to be able to hear, to speak my language,” she says. “The sound of Portuguese is very beautiful; the vowels are soft, the consonants are super soft. There are so many musicians to take inspiration from. It’s a different way of being in general.”

And she is grateful she can tour at all. She took a bad fall at home in 2021 and badly injured a ligament in her foot. “It’s something you don’t quite ever recover from,” she says.

She spent months in bed after surgery with her foot elevated and had to learn to walk again. “I always loved stiletto heels and miniskirts,” she recalls. “I was like Imelda Marcos with 500 pairs of shoes. Now I can only wear sneakers and shoes that are approved by the doctor.”

Walking is difficult, and she has to limit herself. “It hurts me to press the pedal on the piano very much. I play and I grind my teeth.”

“But I am grateful I am walking. I’m enjoying life and doing the best I can. We are all here under the sky and we all deal with things and I’m dealing with mine. I am happy to keep bringing music to everyone and just doing the best I can.”