Anli Sugano (アンリ菅野) was born Umeyama Shizuko (梅山静子) into a musical household in Tokyo. Her father, Umeyama Tsutomu, was a jazz vocalist who had sung tenor in the 1950s vocal group the Bright Rhythm Boys, and her mother, Moeko, was a pianist and former opera singer. Anli started piano and ballet at five. At her girls' high school she was listening to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. She studied oil painting at Musashino Art Junior College and graduated in March 1969, and the decision to sing for a living came after she sat in with musicians at a university arts festival.

After a spell of professional singing in Tokyo, including a Ginza venue, she saw Sammy Davis Jr. perform in Japan and decided to go and learn the trade where it was made. She saved for two years and left for the United States in the autumn of 1972, staying about three years. The lessons were as much physical as vocal: modern dance with Martha Graham, jazz dance with Eugene Louis Faccuito, and voice with Carla White. Back in Tokyo she fronted a rock band as Anli Ohno. The group, Anli & Moses, released two albums in 1977, Mix-Up and Super Street Car.

Her solo career began in 1978, and it began on the pop side of the fence. Mari Vs Anli (Toshiba, September 1978) was a split LP with Mari Nakamoto; Anli's side was arranged by Hiromasa Suzuki with the Colgen New Band, including duets with the singer George Kizu on "Wave" and "The Girl From Ipanema". Her first solo album, Anli: いち (November 1978), carried Japanese-language songs arranged by Tachio Akano and Toshiyuki Kimori. Her live debut followed on 11 June 1979 at the small hall of the Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan in Shinjuku.

Shining Wave (Far East, 1979) is where the jazz singer arrives. Hiromasa Suzuki played piano, electric piano, synthesizer and vocoder and Takeru Muraoka was on tenor saxophone, and the program mixed standards with soul-era pop, among them "The Girl From Ipanema" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off You". That December, on 5 December 1979 at the Kosei Nenkin Kaikan, she sang with the Concord Super Band in a live recording produced by the label's founder Carl E. Jefferson, with Scott Hamilton on tenor saxophone, Warren Vaché on cornet, Dave McKenna on piano, Cal Collins on guitar, Phil Flanigan on bass and Jake Hanna on drums. It was issued in the United States in 1980 as Concord Super Band II, with Anli credited on vocals, and it tied her name to the American mainstream scene that she kept returning to.

Her Eastworld albums of 1980 to 1983 show how wide the label's idea of a jazz singer was. Just Groovin' (1980) is a Tokyo studio record with Akira Inoue arranging and playing, Hiromasa Suzuki arranging two tracks, Yasuaki Shimizu on saxophones, Shigeharu Mukai on trombone, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto on piano and Takeru Muraoka on harmonica. Show Case (1981) went to American session players: Harvey Mason and Leon Ndugu Chancler on drums, Will Lee on bass, Steve Lukather on guitar, George Cables and Bobby Lyle on piano, Larry Dunn on synthesizer, Ernie Watts on saxophones and Paulinho Da Costa on percussion. Love Sketch (1982) was a Concord Jazz session with the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, Scott Hamilton, Warren Vaché, the pianist Mark Levine, the guitarist Eddie Duran and Jeff Hamilton on drums, with Nat Pierce writing the arrangements and playing keyboards. Sweet Memory (1983), recorded digitally with arrangements by John Oddo and the Gay Stars Orchestra, is the most orchestral of the group.

In 1985 she moved to Philips (Nippon Phonogram). 街・彩めいて (Machi Iromeite, 1985) was a city-pop and bossa nova record on which Takeshi Inomata played drums on the title track. For Sunshine Dream (1986) and My Funny Valentine (1987) she worked with the guitarist David T. Walker, who produced and arranged, with Scott Edwards on bass, Jerry Peters on keyboards and, on the standards album, James Gadson on drums and Herman Riley on saxophone. My Funny Valentine was recorded on 27 June 1986 and holds "Take the A Train", "Misty", "Satin Doll" and the title song. She followed it with In Manhattan, recorded on 26, 27 and 28 August 1987 in New York with the cornetist Ruby Braff arranging, the drummer Grady Tate as special guest and the singer Helen Merrill producing. In 1987 she was also the first Japanese singer to appear at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and from 1987 to 1989 she co-presented the NHK music program That's Music.

She founded her own company, Isis, in March 1990. Renewal (Sony, 1993) leaned toward the soul-jazz repertoire of "Night in Tunisia", "Sidewinder" and "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy". She played the Blue Note in New York four times between 1995 and 1998 and in 1999 became the first Japanese artist to perform there five years in a row. In 1997 she won the Grand Prize at the 13th Tsumura Jazz Vocal Award. Komorebi (1998) was cut with a New York band of David Finck on bass, Duduka Da Fonseca on drums, Paul Myers on guitar, Hendrik Meurkens on harmonica, Allen Farnham on keyboards, Steve Sacks on saxophone and flute and Raul Jaurena on accordion.

She was diagnosed with cancer in July 1998 and went into remission in February 1999. That year she published an account of the illness, 女ひとり がんと闘う (A Woman Alone, Fighting Cancer), and released her last album, 心の光輪 (The Light's Rings of Mind), on her own Isis label. The cancer returned, and she passed away on 30 June 2000 at the age of 51. Outside music she was a serious ceramics enthusiast, with solo exhibitions and a book on the subject, and she taught: her former student Ito Sho has held an annual memorial concert for her around June.

She is not the pianist Kunihiko Sugano, who shares the Sugano name but not her career, and she is not the pop singer Anri (杏里), who is a different artist.

Sugano was a mainstream standards singer who also worked fluently in the funk and soul-flavored studio jazz of Japan's late 1970s and early 1980s. Her core repertoire was "Misty", "Sophisticated Lady", "Take the A Train" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To", sung in English and recorded with American players who knew it, from the Concord Jazz regulars of 1979 and 1982 to Ruby Braff and Grady Tate in 1987. Her training outside the voice was in dance, and her American years were spent studying modern dance, jazz dance and singing in parallel.

Her catalogue is not uniformly jazz, and the broader picture is part of the story. Anli: いち (1978) and its 1985 reissue Big Time Suzie, and 街・彩めいて (1985), are filed on Discogs under kayokyoku and city pop alongside jazz-funk and bossa nova, and her 1977 band Anli & Moses played rock and soul-funk fusion. The jazz identity grew over the 1980s and was settled by the end of the decade: her late albums are standards and jazz-vocal dates recorded in New York, and her institutional credentials are jazz ones, from the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Blue Note in New York to the Tsumura Jazz Vocal Award.