Ivan Guimaraes Lins was born June 16, 1945, in Rio de Janeiro, and came to music late and sideways. He took a degree in industrial chemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1960s, played competitive volleyball, and only then turned to songwriting. His entry into Brazilian music was a single event: in 1970 Elis Regina, the most powerful voice in the country, recorded his song "Madalena." Within months he was on Rede Globo hosting the television programme "Som Livre Exportacao" alongside Gonzaguinha and Aldir Blanc, and cutting his first albums for the Forma label, Agora and Deixa o Trem Seguir, both 1971.

The 1970s were harder than that start suggests. He fell out with Philips after Quem Sou Eu? (1972) and left the label late that year, and the period of military censorship pushed his writing toward the oblique. It also produced the partnership that defined his career. Beginning with Modo Livre (RCA Victor, 1974) he wrote almost everything with the lyricist Vitor Martins, a collaboration still running fifty years later, after an earlier run of songs with Ronaldo Monteiro de Souza. The EMI-Odeon albums that followed, Somos Todos Iguais Nesta Noite (1977), Nos Dias de Hoje (1978), A Noite (1979) and Novo Tempo (1980), are the core of his reputation in Brazil and the source of most of the songs the rest of the world would later borrow.

The borrowing started almost at once. George Benson's Give Me the Night (1980) carried two of his songs, "Dinorah, Dinorah" and "Love Dance," and Quincy Jones put "Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song)" on Back on the Block (1989). Sarah Vaughan recorded two Lins tunes on Crazy and Mixed Up (1982). Ella Fitzgerald, Diane Schuur, Sergio Mendes, The Manhattan Transfer and Take 6 all reached for the same book. None of that made him a jazz musician, and it is worth being exact about the difference: on every one of those records his credit is Written-By and nothing else. He was a songwriter the jazz world was raiding, not a player it had hired.

What changed that was GRP. In 1985 Dave Grusin and Lee Ritenour made Harlequin, a jazz-fusion album built around two Lins songs with Lins himself singing them, and the same year he joined Grusin, Ritenour, Dave Valentin and Diane Schuur in front of a live audience at the Record Plant in Los Angeles for GRP Live in Session, credited on keyboards and vocals. The performing credits kept coming for the next three decades: keyboards and vocals with Toots Thielemans on both volumes of The Brasil Project (1992 and 1993), a vocal on Eliane Elias's Fantasia (Blue Note, 1992), lead vocals across Hendrik Meurkens's Poema Brasileiro (Concord Picante, 1996), and a live album cut in Havana in February 1996 co-billed with Chucho Valdes and Irakere.

His own catalog crossed the same line. Live at MCG, recorded at Pittsburgh's Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in September 1997 with his Brazilian quintet and issued in 1999 on MCG Jazz and Heads Up, put him on a jazz label with a jazz audience. In 2000 Telarc assembled A Love Affair: The Music of Ivan Lins, a tribute record on which Sting, Chaka Khan, Dianne Reeves, Vanessa Williams, Grover Washington Jr., Freddy Cole and the New York Voices sang his songs and Lins turned up in the credits himself, playing electric piano behind Reeves and Brenda Russell and taking the last track as lead vocalist. Cantando Historias (EMI, 2004) then won both Album of the Year and Best MPB Album at the 2005 Latin Grammys, and remains the only Album of the Year win by a Portuguese-language artist.

The late work leans further into large-ensemble jazz. Ivan Lins and the Metropole Orchestra (Biscoito Fino, 2009), conducted by Vince Mendoza, took Best MPB Album at that year's Latin Grammys. Abre Alas (GPR, 2012) is billed to the George Robert Jazz Orchestra with Ivan Lins, with Lins on voice and keyboards across seven tracks and arrangements by Bob Mintzer. Cornucopia (Moosicus, 2013) sets him against the SWR Big Band in Germany with Ralf Schmid arranging and conducting. My Heart Speaks (Resonance Records, 2023) is a straightforwardly jazz production, with Randy Brecker on trumpet, Dianne Reeves and Jane Monheit guesting, Josh Nelson at the piano and the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra behind them. The Latin Recording Academy gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award on November 9, 2025, and he released Sambadouro on Selo SESC SP in 2026, fifty-six years after "Madalena."

Lins is a harmonist first. His signature device, and the reason arrangers keep taking his tunes apart, is a suspended chord that resolves late: a sus13 that only admits its sharp eleventh or its flat ninth at the last possible moment, so a line that ought to settle keeps tilting. Layered over samba and baiao rhythms and sung in a warm, slightly grainy baritone that he pushes into falsetto rather than belting, it produces music that reads as pop in Brazil and as harmonically advanced almost everywhere else, which is exactly why the jazz world adopted it. His piano playing is functional rather than virtuosic and almost always in service of the voice, which is why his instrumental credits so often read "voice and keyboards" together. Elis Regina, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the post-bossa MPB generation are his native context; the jazz players who took up his book, from Dave Grusin and Lee Ritenour to Toots Thielemans and Eliane Elias, are the audience he acquired rather than the one he came from, and both facts belong in any honest account of him.