Bia

Bia Biography Bia was born in Brazil. During the years of the military dictatorship, her parents were forced into exile. They moved to Chile, then Peru and finally Portugal. She was 12 when the family went back to their homeland after the Amnisty Law. For a few years she was just a kid going to school and listening to music, brazilian music but also latin-american or anglo-saxon pop music, singing and playing guitar to her friends. Then she enters the University (Journalism) and disappointment comes : the scholar world seems too narrow for someone who’s been travelling since age 3. She chooses to take a break and go Europe for a year. It finally became years. MUSIC - Bia spends a few years sailing around the Atlantic and Mediterranean, learning more about nature, literature, languages, music and politics than she would in any school. In 1995, she decides she won’t be anything else but a musician, and starts going professional. She is living in France and so she sings in French as well as in her mother tongue, Portuguese, or Spanish that she had learned as a child. In 1996, French author and producer Pierre Barouh offers her a first opportunity to record, after listening to her demo : This first album is called « La Mémoire du Vent », and earns an important prize, the « Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros ». She signs translations in French of some of the songs of the great brazilian songwriter Chico Buarque, who warmly and publicly encourages her. In 1998 she sings the soundtrack of a Claude Lelouch picture, goes touring in Japan, Italy and Canada, besides France where she starts to be quite well-known. She releases her second album, « Sources », in 2000. Partly recorded in Rio de Janeiro, this album shows the maturity she is gaining as a songwriter, as well as her need to return to her country’s sources of inspiration. Her third album, « Carmin » 2003. Partly recorded in Paris, partly in Montreal, where she spends much of her time, this new record is sensuous, graceful, creative and irresistible. Bia releases a new album, called “Coeur Vagabond” , « Vagabond Heart. », which earns nominations (Canadian Juno Awards 2007) and prizes (Quebec's FELIX 2006), along with acknowledgment from French stars such as Henri Salvador and Laurent Voulzy, whom she both covers on her album. The Coeur Vagabond tour makes its way throughout Canada, France, Italy, Brazil, as usual, but also Germany, Moldavia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Belgium and Turkey. During the year 2007, in between shows, she works on her new original songs album, called Nocturno (Nightly). The mood of this beautiful piece of art is rather folk-ish, horns and brass written and enhance the magnificent melodies and Bïa’s sensuous singing. Nocturno is being now released march 2008, in Canada and other countries will soon follow. Her exposure in Quebec, Canada, is getting wider and wider. She makes more than hundreds of concerts, many radio and TV shows, and the press and public support her.