About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Elis Regina

Encyclopedia : E : EL : ELI : Elis Regina

Elis Regina Carvalho Costa (March 17, 1945 – January 19, 1982) is still among the most popular female singers in Brazil, decades after her death .

Contents

Biography

Elis Regina was born in Porto Alegre, where she began her career as singer at age 11 on a children's radio show, 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.

She won her first festival song contest in 1965 singing "Arrastão" -"The Trawling Net"-by Edu Lobo and Vinícius de Moraes, which, when it was released as a single, made her the biggest selling Brazilian recording artist since Carmen Miranda. Her second LP with Jair Rodrigues, Dois na Bossa, set a national sales record.

In the late '60s and early '70s, Regina helped to popularize the work of the tropicalia movement, recording songs by such musicians 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. She also recorded songs by Milton Nascimento, João Bosco, Aldir Blanc, Chico Buarque, Jorge Ben and Caetano Veloso. She possessed an exciting voice and superb intonation, and excelled at up-tempo numbers. Her nickname was "furacão" ("the hurricane"), and also "pimentinha" ("little pepper").

She sometimes criticized the Brazilian dictatorship which had persecuted and exiled many musicians of her generation. In a 1969 interview, she opined 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 as a mother and daughter she had to protect her family from the dictatorship at any cost.

Elis Regina succumbed to an accidental drug interaction in 1982, at the age of 36, having recorded dozens of top-selling records in her career. She is buried in the Cemitério do Morumbi in São Paulo.

Her song "Roda" appeared on the soundtrack to Be Cool.

Family

Elis married twice and gave birth to three children. Her first marriage was to Ronaldo Bôscoli in 1967. She gave birth to a son, João Marcelo Bôscoli, in 1970.

She later wed her long-time collaborator César Camargo Mariano, and had two more children with him: Pedro Camargo Mariano in 1975, and Maria Rita in 1977. The three children all later became musicians. Maria Rita, in particular, became a national singing sensation, like her mother, winning 3 Latin Grammies for her CD "Maria Rita". Joao Boscoli produced the first Elis Regina DVD allowing many of her fans to see 'The Diva" performing for the first time in a 1973 Brazilian TV show featuring songs and an interview. Pedro Camargo Mariano sang with his father, the brilliant pianist and arranger Cesar Camaro Mariano, on a Latin Grammy-nominated CD called "Piano & Voz" (Piano and Voice).

Discography

Posthumous releases

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: