Manuel Linhares was born in Horta, on the Azorean island of Faial, on August 4, 1983, and moved to Porto with his family before his second birthday. Porto was his father's family's city (his mother's side is Azorean), and it is where he has lived and worked ever since. He was put into piano lessons in primary school and studied the instrument for five years, but singing was the thing that held him: school choirs first, then solo work. At 18 he enrolled at the Escola de Jazz do Porto, in 2002, to study voice. He later completed a degree in architecture and then took a jazz degree at ESMAE, the Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo in Porto.

His first exposure to jazz singing came through Ella Fitzgerald, and for a long time Nat King Cole was the only male jazz voice he knew well. That changed at the Taller de Músics in Barcelona, where he studied in 2006 and where a teacher played him Kurt Elling. He gave his first live performance in Barcelona that year before returning to Porto. Between 2007 and 2010 he sang in Canto Nono, the vocal group directed by the Portuguese songwriter José Mário Branco. He then studied at the Jazz Institute of Berlin in 2010 and 2011, and it was in Berlin that he started writing his own material rather than working exclusively from standards.

Linhares has worked and studied with a long list of singers and improvisers from outside Portugal: Bobby McFerrin, who invited him to serve as an assistant on the CircleSongs workshops, along with Judy Niemack, Theo Bleckmann, John Hollenbeck, David Linx, Rebecca Martin, Becca Stevens, Gretchen Parlato and Meredith Monk. Inside Portugal he has recorded or performed with José Mário Branco, Rui Veloso, Sofia Ribeiro, Pedro Moreira and Claus Nymark. His festival appearances include Berlin Jazz Fest (2011), Angrajazz (2011 and 2013), the Porta-Jazz Festival in Porto (2012 and 2022), Festa do Jazz (2019) and Caldas Nice Jazz (2020).

He released his first album of originals, Traces of Cities, on his own imprint in September 2013, recorded that July with pianist Paulo Barros, bassist José Carlos Barbosa and drummer Filipe Monteiro, plus Rui Teixeira on alto saxophone and bass clarinet and the Galician saxophonist Xosé Miguélez as guest on tenor. Boundaries followed in February 2019, a stripped-back quartet record with Barros, Barbosa and João Cunha on drums, written entirely by Linhares with titles and lyrics split between English ("Yet Another Wall," "Whatever We Call Home") and Portuguese ("Enquanto," "Repousando").

Suspenso, released January 28, 2022 by the Porto collective label Carimbo Porta-Jazz, was the record that widened his audience. The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist António Loureiro produced and arranged it and played synthesizers, drums and electric bass; the working trio of Barros, Barbosa and Cunha remained at the center; and the guest list ran to alto saxophonist David Binney, the twelve-piece Coreto Porta Jazz ensemble, bassist Frederico Heliodoro, trumpeter Rubinho Antunes and flautist Alexandre Andrés. Guillermo Klein arranged "Jogo de Sombras" and the Portuguese rapper Capicua wrote the lyrics to "Dança Macabra." Much of it was assembled remotely under pandemic conditions. Reviewing it for Público, Nuno Catarino gave the album four stars and called it the definitive confirmation of Linhares as a jazz voice marked by elegance and restraint.

Now based in New York and splitting his time with Porto, Linhares made his debut for the Brooklyn label 577 Records with Atlântico on June 12, 2026. It was recorded in June 2025 at Studio 42 in Williamsburg and at CARA in Porto, with Glenn Zaleski on piano, Or Bareket on double bass, Keita Ogawa on drums and percussion, David Binney as guest on alto, and the Portuguese players Gil Silva (tenor saxophone) and Hugo Caldeira (trombone). Loureiro produced again and mixed the record. Alongside performing, Linhares has directed O Círculo da Voz, a vocal improvisation laboratory in Porto, since 2017, and has co-run the Vocal Being Retreat with Sofia Ribeiro since 2019. He also works in a duo with the São Paulo based Brazilian singer Pedro Iaco, whom he met through McFerrin's workshops, and sings in saxophonist Carlos Martins's Mar-Planície project.

Linhares is one of the very few men working as a jazz singer in Portugal, and his sound sits between an Atlantic melancholy drawn from Portuguese song and the rhythmic push of Brazilian music and contemporary jazz. Ella Fitzgerald was his first model, Nat King Cole his only early male reference, and Kurt Elling the discovery that showed him what a male jazz voice could do technically; critics have heard Elling's compositional sensibility in his writing. He composes almost everything he records, moving between English and Portuguese lyrics within a single album, and treats the voice as a line instrument rather than a delivery system for a lyric, an approach that comes directly out of the vocal improvisation tradition he learned from Bobby McFerrin, Meredith Monk and Theo Bleckmann and that he now teaches. From Suspenso onward his records have leaned harder on studio construction: synthesizers, layered horns and a producer's arrangements sit alongside the piano trio, and Atlântico pushes further into open, texture-led writing with two free improvisations bracketing the songs.