Tânia Maria Correa Reis, known professionally as Tania Maria, was born on May 9, 1948, in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão in northeastern Brazil. She began piano at the age of seven. By thirteen she was leading a band of professional musicians that her father, a metalworker and a gifted guitarist and singer, had organized; the group won first prize in a local music contest and went on to play dances, clubs and the radio. His weekend jam sessions were where she first took in samba, jazz, pop and chorinho, and she has never worked in anyone else's group since. Her mother opposed a musical career, and at seventeen she married, gave up the piano and studied law for about two and a half years, before leaving the marriage after five years to make her living as a musician.

Her first album, Apresentamos Tânia Maria, came out in Brazil in 1966 on Continental, followed by Olha Quem Chega in 1971. The step that opened an international audience came in 1974, when she moved to Paris and took a residency at the Via Brazil restaurant. Barclay issued the two Via Brasil albums in 1975, with the bassist Helio and the drummer José Boto, and followed them with Brazil with My Soul in 1978, which used rhythm sections that included Aldo Romano on drums. In Copenhagen the Danish label Medley recorded her live at the Jazzhus Montmartre in November 1978 and in the studio in September 1979 with the bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.

The American connection began with the guitarist Charlie Byrd, who heard her play at a concert in Australia and recommended her to Carl Jefferson, the founder of Concord Records. Her American debut, Piquant (Concord Picante, 1981), was produced by the vibraphonist Cal Tjader and brought her the Golden Feather Award from the Los Angeles Times critic Leonard Feather. She settled in New York at the start of the 1980s and stayed with Concord for the albums that made her name: Taurus (1982), Come with Me (1983), Love Explosion (1984) and the live The Real Tania Maria: Wild! (1985). The title song of Come with Me became a dance-floor favorite that has been covered often since, and "Deep Cove View" from Love Explosion was promoted by Robbie Vincent on his Sunday-night soul shows on BBC Radio 1.

Made in New York (Manhattan, 1985), produced by Eric Kressmann and Tania Maria with Eumir Deodato as associate producer, widened her audience further and earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female, listed in the Grammy database under 1986. The Lady from Brazil (Manhattan, 1986) paired her with studio players including Steve Gadd, Peter Erskine, Eddie Gómez and Paulinho da Costa, with George Duke producing three tracks. Capitol issued Forbidden Colors in 1988 and World Pacific Bela Vista in 1990; she returned to Concord for Outrageous in 1993, and Europe (1997) is a live album assembled from road recordings, with Gadd and the bassist Anthony Jackson on four of its seven tracks. She has played the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1981, 1983 and 1989, the Newport Jazz Festival in 1975 and the Montreux Jazz Festival, and she first appeared at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague in 1978 and has returned at least ten times.

Her later albums include Viva Brazil (2000), Live at the Blue Note (Concord Picante, 2002), Intimidade (Blue Note, 2005), It's Only Love, a live recording with the Frankfurt Radio Bigband made on February 9, 2007, in Darmstadt, and Tempo (Naïve, 2011), a duo with the bassist Eddie Gómez that was nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 2012 Latin Grammy Awards. Canto followed in 2012. Wikipedia counts more than twenty-five albums under her own name.

Tania Maria is a pianist who also sings, and she has described her piano as percussive, with the voice often scatting in unison or harmony with the right hand. Her warm alto and quick, rhythmic scat sit on a Brazilian foundation of samba, bossa nova and chorinho, which she blends with the harmonic language of jazz, Afro-Latin rhythm, funk and soul; the same records have been filed as samba-jazz, Latin jazz and jazz fusion, and her best-known song belongs as much to the dance floor as to the club. Her influences are usually listed as Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Sarah Vaughan, Luiz Eça, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento. She records for jazz labels, has been nominated in jazz categories at the Grammys and the Latin Grammys, and is booked at jazz festivals worldwide, though a part of her catalogue, sung in Portuguese and English, crosses into pop and club music.