Eumir Deodato de Almeida was born June 22, 1942, in Rio de Janeiro, to Italian and Portuguese parents. A self-taught musician who started on accordion at twelve, he had his first professional recording session at seventeen and, with his 1964 solo debut Inútil Paisagem, fused jazz and bossa nova alongside contemporaries Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto in Brazil's 1960s music revolution. He moved to New York in 1968, working with guitarist Luiz Bonfá and doing extensive studio arranging for Astrud Gilberto, Walter Wanderley, Jobim, and Marcos Valle.

Arranging Astrud Gilberto's Beach Samba brought him into contact with producer Creed Taylor, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile; Taylor hired Deodato to arrange for other CTI artists including Wes Montgomery, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, and Paul Desmond. His own first US album, Prelude (1973), was built around a big-band Latin jazz arrangement of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, best known to most listeners as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The track peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, went to No. 3 in Canada and No. 7 in the UK, sold five million copies worldwide, won the 1974 Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, and earned Deodato a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

Deodato's arrangements bridged Brazilian bossa nova, orchestral classical repertoire, and funk-inflected jazz keyboard playing, a genre-crossing instinct that made his reinterpretation of a 19th-century tone poem into a chart-topping single feel less like a novelty than a natural extension of his working method.