Brazil's Joyce: music on her own terms.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Singer - Includes discography - Interview

The voice is every bit as sunny, the lyrics as witty, and the melodies as beguiling as when her 1968 debut album electrified the contemporary Brazilian music world and trumpeted the arrival of a new breed of artist: a female singer whose skills as a guitarist and talent for creating engaging melodies and provocative lyrics matched her prowess as a vocalist and made her one of the most revered songwriters of her generation.

In 1997 the singer known simply as Joyce returns to the center stage of her country's often chaotic popular music scene with an album as imposing and charming as any in her career, verifying her status as one of Brazil's most important creative musicians of our time. The lady, who with such celebrated fellow travelers as Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins, Caetano Veloso, and Edu Lobo, refined Brazillian music of the post-bossa nova era into a high state of world-class pop art, is back with the kind of intellectually stimulating, musically intriguing performance that challenged her country's conservative music establishment a quarter of a century ago.

"The mere fact that I am making a new album with all originals says something very important," says Joyce of Ilha Brasil [Brazil Island], her debut for the U.S.-based World Pacific label. "I hadn't been able to do this kind of album in Brazil in recent years. But there's been a kind of renaissance of Brazilian music recently, and many musicians who had oriented their style to pop music are returning to their roots. Now, the public is ready to listen again."

While Joyce had never abandoned her patented formula of sophisticated melodies, probing lyrics, bossa-infused rhythms, jazz-savvy vocals, and collaborations with many of Brazil's best arrangers, musicians, and singers, the door had been all but closed to presenting the kind of fresh, highly individual music that had been her trademark for most of her twenty-nine-year, eighteen-album career.

"In recent years," recalls the forty-nine-year-old native of Rio de Janeiro, "I was mostly limited to recording live albums of my old hits or doing the music of my dear friend Antonio Carlos Jobim. But a time comes when you have to put out new material, and I hadn't been able to do that except for albums abroad, in the U.S., Japan, and Europe."

And a growing global audience has been paying rapt attention. "What her extensive catalogue reveals is an accomplished jazz singer and writer," notes the London Observer. "In Tokyo and London, she is...