Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known to everyone as Naná, was born in Recife, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, on August 2, 1944. His father was a working musician, and by the Brazilian accounts of his childhood the son was playing bongos and maracas in a Recife ensemble at seven or eight, teaching himself on the pots and pans at home. At twelve he was working bars with his father's marching band and sitting in with local maracatu groups, the drum-and-chant processions of the Recife carnival. He learned the drum kit first and the berimbau, the one-string gourd-resonated bow that capoeira players use, later, and in the 1960s the berimbau became the sound people identified with him.

In 1967 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and appeared on the national scene alongside the then-new singer and composer Milton Nascimento, a friendship that lasted the rest of his life. In 1968 he went to São Paulo with Geraldo Azevedo for the Quarteto Livre, the group that backed Geraldo Vandré at the third Festival Internacional da Canção. He played on Gal Costa's Legal (1970), and around the start of the 1970s he formed the Trio do Bagaço with Nélson Angelo and Maurício Maestro, which played in Mexico at the invitation of Luiz Eça. The Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri then took him abroad. He is on Barbieri's Fenix (Flying Dutchman, 1971) and on the live El Pampero (1972), cut at the Montreux festival, and those tours of the United States and Europe were his introduction to international audiences. Don Cherry used him on the sprawling Organic Music Society (recorded 1972), where Vasconcelos composed the twelve-minute "North Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn." His first records under his own name came out in this period: The Incredible Naná (Argentina, 1971), Africadeus (Saravah, France, 1973) and Amazonas (Philips, Brazil, 1973).

The breakthrough was a record for Manfred Eicher's ECM label. Dança das Cabeças (recorded November 1976, released 1977) is a duo with the Brazilian guitarist, pianist and flutist Egberto Gismonti, made in three days, with Vasconcelos on berimbau, percussion, body percussion and voice. It won awards in several countries and made both men known well outside Brazil. He was on Gismonti's Sol do Meio Dia the next year, played on four Jon Hassell records between 1976 and 1980, including Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics with Brian Eno, and in 1977 formed Codona with Cherry and the sitarist and tabla player Collin Walcott. Three self-titled ECM albums followed (recorded September 1978, May 1980 and September 1982, released 1979, 1981 and 1983), which critics have since called an early landmark of what came to be known as world music. The trio ended with Walcott's death in 1984. His own Saudades (ECM, recorded March 1979) set a berimbau piece of nearly nineteen minutes beside members of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Gismonti on guitar.

In 1980 he began working with Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays. As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (recorded September 1980, released April 1981) is a trio record with Metheny and Mays on which he plays berimbau, percussion, drums and voice. He then joined the Pat Metheny Group for Offramp (recorded October 1981, released May 1982), where his wordless singing and percussion brought South American color into the band's sound, and was the special guest on the live double album Travels (ECM, 1983). Both records won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance. Alongside that came ECM sessions with Jan Garbarek, starting with Eventyr (1981, with John Abercrombie) and continuing through Legend of the Seven Dreams (1988) and I Took Up the Runes (1990). In 1981 he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival, held for the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio, and from 1984 to 1989 he was honorary president of the London School of Samba. Rolling Stone Brasil's obituary says he lived in New York for 27 years.

The 1980s and 1990s were his busiest decades as a hired and invited musician across every kind of music. He played percussion on one track of Talking Heads' Little Creatures (1985) and on six tracks of Paul Simon's The Rhythm of the Saints (1990), and the credits run on through Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels, B.B. King, Chaka Khan, Caetano Veloso's Estrangeiro and Circuladô, Marisa Monte, Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Gipsy Kings. On the jazz side he joined Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition on Irresistible Forces (1987) and Eliane Elias's Eliane Elias Plays Jobim (1990). His own records of the period include Zumbi (1983), Duas Vozes (1985), a second Gismonti duo, Bush Dance (Antilles, 1987), Lester (Soul Note), a duo with the accordionist and pianist Antonello Salis recorded in Milan in December 1985, Rain Dance (Antilles, 1989) with the Bushdancers and the percussionist Cyro Baptista, the ECM trio record If You Look Far Enough (1993) with the bassist Arild Andersen and the guitarist Ralph Towner, Storytelling (1995) and Fragments: Modern Tradition (Tzadik, 1997), on John Zorn's label. Excerpts of his Codona piece "Trayra Boia" were used on U2's "Last Night on Earth" in 1997. The Down Beat critics poll named him best percussionist year after year through the 1980s, and obituaries in the American and Brazilian press credit him with eight Grammy Awards.

He spent his later years working from Recife again. For about fifteen consecutive years he opened the city's Carnival by bringing the rival maracatu nations together, and he ran social projects that put public-school children's choirs on stage with orchestras. His later solo albums were Chegada (2005), Trilhas (2006), Sinfonia & Batuques (2011), recorded in Recife with a chamber orchestra and a children's choir and with his daughter Luz Morena on piano on three tracks, and 4 Elementos (2013). Sinfonia & Batuques won the Latin Grammy for Best Portuguese Language Roots Album at the 12th Latin Grammy Awards. In 2013 Pernambuco made him a Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Guararapes, and he contributed to the soundtrack of the Oscar-nominated animated film O Menino e o Mundo. In 2015 he released Café no Bule with Zeca Baleiro and Paulo Lepetit.

Vasconcelos was diagnosed with lung cancer in mid-2015, kept working through treatment, and received an honorary doctorate from the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco on December 9, 2015. He passed away in Recife on March 9, 2016, at 71, and the state of Pernambuco declared three days of official mourning. He is survived by two daughters, Jasmin Azul and Luz Morena. Pat Metheny, remembering him, called him one of the best percussionists in this music and an amazing person, and said he made friends everywhere he went with the berimbau on his shoulder.

Vasconcelos was self-taught, and what he built from that start was a one-man percussion orchestra that could be as quiet as a rainfall. He used the voice, the body, water, and anything lying around that made a sound, and he layered his own singing over the ringing of the berimbau string in a way Brazilian critics singled out as unconventional. AllMusic notes his command of odd meters such as 5/4 and 7/4, which were common in the north of Brazil and rarely heard in the south, and Brazilian writers credit him and Airto Moreira with breaking the assumption in American jazz that percussion meant Afro-Cuban congas and bongos.

His jazz credits are substantial, but the music that made his name is jazz-adjacent rather than straight jazz. The ECM duo with Gismonti, Codona with Cherry and Walcott, and the Metheny records are jazz-world records, and AllMusic's genre tags for him run from Brazilian jazz and global jazz to Latin jazz. A large part of his own catalog, though, belongs to Brazilian folk and popular music: maracatu rhythms from Pernambuco, the capoeira berimbau, the northeastern Brazilian rhythms of his childhood, the MPB circle around Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso. Another large part belongs to world music and pop, from the Fourth World records with Jon Hassell to the Paul Simon, Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson sessions. Brazilian accounts name the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos as an early inspiration, and the long friendships with Nascimento, Gismonti, Cherry and Metheny shaped the rest. Rolling Stone Brasil's obituary says he followed Buddhism through Metheny's influence while remaining close to the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé.