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Leny de Andrade Lima, better known as Leny Andrade, was born in Rio de Janeiro, on January 25, 1943, and is a Brazilian singer and musician. Both Andrade's first and last names are sometimes misspelled in English as "Lenny", "Leni", and "Adrade". She has had several hits on the Brazilian charts. In 2007 she shared a Latin Grammy Award with Cesar Camargo Mariano for Best MPB Album, Ao Vivo.
She began her career singing in clubs, lived five years in Mexico and spent a good part of her life living in the United States and Europe. She studied piano at the Brazilian Conservatory of Music.
Leny Andrade has performed with Paquito D'Rivera, Luiz Eça, Dick Farney, João Donato, Eumir Deodato, Pery Ribeiro, and Francis Hime. Leny Andrade's eclectic style is a synthesis of samba and jazz.
Andrade, considered by many the greatest singer of Brazilian jazz, has never had great commercial success, but is a well-respected jazz artist. She has been described by Tony Bennett as the "Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil". Likewise in Europe where she toured, she was the acclaimed Brazilians' First Lady of Jazz, building a huge fan base in the Netherlands and Italy. This resulted in the recording of an American Songbook album Embraceable You in July 1991 at Volendam, in the Netherlands. New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote of Andrade's performance at Birdland on August 27, 2008, "To describe Ms. Andrade as both the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald of bossa nova only goes so far in evoking a performer whose voice seems to contain the body and soul of Brazil. You may think you know 'The Girl From Ipanema,' the final number in the show’s opening medley of Jobim songs. But you haven’t really absorbed it until you’ve heard Ms. Andrade sing it in Portuguese; disgorge might be a better word than sing, since, like everything else she performs, it seems to well up from the center of the earth."
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