Lisa Ono (小野リサ, Ono Risa) is a bossa nova singer and guitarist whose records are sorted under jazz by Japanese award juries, record stores and festival programmers, and under bossa nova and Brazilian music by almost everyone else. The honest description is the second one: she is first of all a bossa nova singer, and her place on a jazz site rests on the jazz awards, the jazz-standards albums and the jazz musicians she has recorded with, not on a career spent improvising.

She was born Risa Ono (小野里沙) on July 29, 1962, in São Paulo, to Japanese parents. Her father had gone to Brazil in 1958 and ran music venues there, and English Wikipedia says he was also the agent of the guitarist Baden Powell. When she was ten the family moved to Tokyo, to Omori in Ota Ward, and Japan has been her home and the base of her career ever since. Her father opened a Brazilian restaurant with live music in Yotsuya, Saci-Pererê, which became a meeting place for Brazilian musicians and diplomats. She began playing guitar at about fifteen and started singing there, at first reluctantly. She attended the Shoei Girls' School in Tokyo, and after finishing school she spent time living in Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro; English Wikipedia describes her splitting each year between Japan and Rio.

By the late 1980s she was writing songs and playing Tokyo jazz clubs, among them J in Shinjuku and Satin Doll in Roppongi. She is credited on acoustic guitar on "Voce é Bossanova" on Taeko Ohnuki's album Purissima (1988, Midi), and the same label issued her debut, Catupiry, in October 1989. Her first singles were tied to television commercials, including a Max Factor spot for "You're So Unique". Nanã (Midi, April 1990) followed with coordinators credited in both New York and Rio de Janeiro, and it won the Japan Gold Disc Award in the jazz category. Her official biography lists four Gold Disc jazz awards in all.

She produced Menina (1991), released on her own Nanã label, and over the next five years she made the records that fixed her sound: Serenata Carioca (1992), the seven-song Namorada (1993), Esperança (1994) and Minha Saudade (1995). Namorada has Hiroshi Fukumura on trombone and Toots Thielemans on harmonica. Esperança has Fukumura again, the accordionist Sivuca, the clarinetist Paulo Moura, and Antonio Carlos Jobim himself on piano on one track, "Estrada Branca", beside his son Paulo Jobim on guitar and the flutist Danilo Caymmi. Minha Saudade was built around the songs of the Brazilian pianist João Donato, who is credited on piano, keyboards, trombone, vocals and percussion. Her official biography lists a Blue Note tour and her first New York shows in 1994 and 1995.

In the late 1990s her records moved to EMI Music Japan, issued under the Suite¡ Supuesto! label. Bossa Carioca (1998) was produced with Paulo and Daniel Jobim, Antonio Carlos Jobim's son and grandson. Dream (1999) is the record that is easiest to defend as jazz: American swing-era standards such as "Tea for Two", "Night and Day", "As Time Goes By" and "In the Mood", arranged and produced by the Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, with Don Grusin on piano, Dave Carpenter on bass and Mike Shapiro on drums. Wikipedia and her official site say it sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan. Pretty World (2000) gave English-language pop and film songs to Eumir Deodato, who arranged and conducted it and plays piano and keyboards, with Conrad Herwig on trombone.

From 2001 she made a run of themed albums, each one a different repertoire sung in a bossa nova frame: Hawaiian songs on Bossa Hula Nova (2001), Italian songs on Questa Bossa Mia... (2002), French songs on Dans Mon Île (2003), African and Arabic songs on Naima Meu Anjo (2004), Christmas songs on Boas Festas (2000) and Boas Festas 2 (2004), and Latin boleros on the three Romance Latino albums (2005). Dans Mon Île was also pressed on vinyl in the United States by Groove Note, and it has the accordionist Richard Galliano on two tracks, with the arranger Mario Adnet conducting and the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo on strings. For Boas Festas 2, Romero Lubambo, Toninho Horta and Castro-Neves are credited as arrangers and producers. Her official biography says Romance Latino Vol. 1 and Jambalaya Bossa Americana (2006, American country songs) won Gold Disc jazz album awards, and that she played the Java Jazz Festival in Jakarta in 2007 and 2015.

In 2007 she made Soul & Bossa, with classic soul songs ("The Dock of the Bay", "Georgia on My Mind", "What's Going On?") arranged by Dori Caymmi, Adnet, Lubambo and the pianist Bill Cantos, and a Jobim tribute, The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim "Ipanema". In March 2009 she released two jazz-standards albums on the same day: Cheek to Cheek: Jazz Standards from Rio, arranged and co-produced by Adnet, with "Take the A Train", "Satin Doll", "Caravan" and "Fly Me to the Moon", and Look to the Rainbow: Jazz Standards from L.A., with "My Funny Valentine", "Stormy Weather" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To". Her official biography also lists a Shanghai Jazzy appearance and a Jobim tribute concert at Hibiya Open-Air Music Hall that year, Brazil's Order of Rio Branco in 2013, shows at Blue Note Tokyo with Adnet in 2014, and an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2014.

Alongside this she has made a very large body of music that is not jazz. The Japão albums (2011, 2013, 2014) sing Japanese pop and kayokyoku songs, some of them in Portuguese; Asia (2010) covers songs from across the continent; Dancing Bossa (2016) turns pop hits such as "Dancing Queen" into bossa nova; and her catalogue is full of café-style compilations. Japão 3 was recorded in California with Bill Cantos, the guitarist Grant Geissman and the drummer Mike Shapiro. In 2018 she released Tabi soshite Furusato, a 30th-anniversary album of travel songs.

The jazz circle around her has widened late rather than narrowed. In 2021 she was a guest on the pianist Junko Onishi's quartet album Grand Voyage, credited on guitar and vocals on "Flor De Organdi" and as the lyricist of Onishi's tune. Her newest album, Sue Ann: Homage to Antonio Carlos Jobim, came out on Verve and Universal Music on April 8, 2026, in a voice-and-piano duo with the pianist Masaki Hayashi, who co-produced it. The alto saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is credited as guest on three tracks, and the album carries liner notes by Haruki Murakami. It was made for the centenary of Jobim's birth in 2027, and a duo tour with Hayashi is planned for February to April 2027. In October 2026 she is on an Australian tour that opened in Brisbane on October 15 and continues through Sydney and Adelaide.

Across her career she has made dozens of albums under her own name, nearly all for Japanese labels, and she hosted a J-WAVE radio programme, SAUDE! SAUDADE..., from 2001 to 2010.

Her music starts with the guitar-and-voice intimacy of João Gilberto and the songs of Jobim, sung softly and mostly in Portuguese, with Japanese and English added over the years. The sound is a light, unforced voice over nylon-string guitar and a small rhythm section or strings, which is why so many compilations of her work are built as café and lifestyle collections, and why Wikipedia, Wikidata and Discogs all describe her simply as a bossa nova singer.

The jazz side is real but it sits beside that identity rather than replacing it. Discogs files 29 of her 47 own-name album entries under Jazz and 26 under Latin, with bossa nova as the style tag on 42; the jazz-tagged ones tend to be the Jobim and standards albums (Bossa Carioca, Dream, Cheek to Cheek, Look to the Rainbow, Sue Ann) and the themed albums. her official biography counts four Japan Gold Disc awards in the jazz category; Universal's Jazz 100 Years vocal-collection series in 2017 and 2018 includes her; and she appears on the Blue Note and Somethin' Else compilation Angel (Jazz Ladies) (2004) with "La Vie En Rose". She is credited as a vocalist on Duduka Da Fonseca's Samba Jazz Fantasia and as guitarist and backing vocalist on Monday Michiru's Optimista (1999), and in 1988 she sang on a track of Naoya Matsuoka's Latin-fusion album Majestic.

Against that, most of her catalogue is bossa nova and popular song: the Japanese-song albums, the lifestyle and television-commercial work, and the compilations. Bossa nova itself is not on this site's list of jazz subgenres, so the two tags above are the closest fit rather than a precise description: Vocal Jazz for the singing and the standards, and Samba-Jazz for the Brazilian-jazz crossover.