Born in a Rio favela, Elza Soares overcame all sorts of struggle and tragedy in her lifetime to become a national treasure. Married at the age of 12 (and with a child a year later), Soares won a singing competition in her teens that confirmed her talent, but it wasn’t until 1960 that she released her first album, Se Acaso Você Chegasse, which set her on a course to explore all manner of samba, bossa nova, and MPB over the ensuing decades. After a quiet period in the ’80s and ’90s (during which she experienced the death of her son and husband), she reemerged in the 2000s to great acclaim, reinventing herself as a husky-voiced diva who could sing just as marvelously over traditional Brazilian pop as she could rock, electronic, and experimental sounds. She died on January 20, 2022, at the age of 91.