Bïa

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Bïa is a Brazilian-born singer currently living in France. Bia was born in Brazil. During the years of the military dictatorship, her parents were forced into exile. They moved to Chile, then Peru and finally Portugal. She was 12 when the family went back to their homeland after the Amnesty Law.

For a few years she was just a kid going to school and listening to music, Brazilian music but also Latin-American or Anglo-Saxon pop music, singing and playing guitar to her friends. Then she enters the University (Journalism) and disappointment comes : the scholar world seems too narrow for someone who’s been traveling since age 3. She chooses to take a break and go Europe for a year. It finally became years.

Bia spends a few years sailing around the Atlantic and Mediterranean, learning more about nature, literature, languages, music and politics than she would in any school. In 1995, she decides she won’t be anything else but a musician, and starts going professional. She is living in France and so she sings in French as well as in her mother tongue, Portuguese, or Spanish that she had learned as a child.

In 1996, French author and producer Pierre Barouh offers her a first opportunity to record, after listening to her demo : This first album is called « La Mémoire du Vent », and earns an important prize, the « Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros ». She signs translations in French of some of the songs of the great brazilian songwriter Chico Buarque, who warmly and publicly encourages her.

In 1998 she sings the soundtrack of a Claude Lelouch picture, goes touring in Japan, Italy and Canada, besides France where she starts to be quite well-known.

She releases her second album, « Sources », in 2000. Partly recorded in Rio de Janeiro, this album shows the maturity she is gaining as a songwriter, as well as her need to return to her country’s sources of inspiration. She also pays a tribute to the Beatles, which she has always loved, by covering « Golden Slumbers ».

Her exposure in Quebec, Canada, is getting wider and wider. She makes more than a hundred concerts, radio and TV shows, and the press and public support her.

In 2003, Bia releases her third album, « Carmin ». Most of the songs are hers, but she still pays homage to her favourite songwriters such as Brazilian Chico Buarque, Italian Gianmaria Testa or French Henri Salvador. And she brings into light a wonderful Inca mantra, « Inti », a Pre-Colombian hymn to the sun played in a drum & bass unexpected and beautiful arrangement.

Partly recorded in Paris, partly in Montreal, where she spends much of her time, this new record is sensuous, graceful, creative and irresistible.

Bia goes on singing in several latin languages, creating tasty mixes between bossa-nova or samba rithms and French language, pop flavours sang in South American style, and some very Brazilian or afro-brazilian songs.

Carmin has been produced by Robson Galdino, a carioca (from Rio) guitar player and studio wiz living in Paris, and Erik West Millette, a bass, guitar and slides player from Montreal. Together they have managed to express all the richness and fertility of Bia’s musical universe, in a modern and acoustic way that shows maturity and profoundness as well as playfulness.

After her remarkable concert for the International Jazz Festival of Montreal in July 2003, Bia and her group go back to Europe for concerts in Italy and France, before returning for a new tour in Québec. They are also preparing a live DVD.