CéU
Trip hop Samba
There are good reasons for the depth and complexity of CéU's songs. She was born into a musical family in the artistically diverse city of São Paulo; her father, a locally renowned composer, arranger and musicologist, taught her at a young age to appreciate the music of Brazil's great classical composers, including Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ernesto Nazaré and Orlando Silva. By age 15 she had decided to become a singer, and pursued music studies in lieu of a college education; trained on the violão (a nylon-stringed Brazilian guitar) and in music theory, she was performing onstage with major artists and exploring the repertoire of the marchinhas (turn-of-the-century carnival music) by her late teens.
Soon after that she relocated temporarily to New York City, where she had a chance meeting with fellow Brazilian musician Antonio Pinto, who became her flat mate while he was going through some financial difficulties. She later learned that he was actually a distant cousin, and their relationship was renewed when he teamed up with lead producer Beto Villares to help her record her album. Pinto, who produced CéU's song "Ave Cruz" is the composer of the musical score for two Oscar Nominated films, Central Station (1999) and City of God (2003.)
Originally issued in 2005 on the São Paulo-based Urban Jungle label Jungle and Beto Villares’ Ambulante Discos, CéU was picked up by Six Degrees/Starbucks/Hear Music in the US and UK (in partenrship with WhatMusic), by LCL in Canada, JVC in Japan and Oplus in France and in the Netherlands. CéU has a Latin Grammy nomination for “best new artist” of 2006 and just received a Grammy nomination for "Best Contemporary World Music Album." of 2007. She is also riding high on a wave of international success in France, where the influential Les Inrockuptibles recognized her as one of the top 5 musical revelations of 2005, Holland, and Italy, as well as in Canada, where she was recently the fourth highest-selling artist for the Archambault chain of music shops while simultaneously holding the number 32 slot on the pop charts.
Debut album in the U.S. with Six Degrees Records as the first international artist on Starbucks' Hear Music Debut Series. Her album was received with critical praise from NPR's Morning Edition, The Associated Press, Reuters, and many more, hailing her as "…a fresh new face in the Brazilian music scene." Her album has sound scanned over 90,000 copies to date, making her the biggest selling Brazilian artist of 2007. CéU reached unprecedented chart numbers for a Brazilian female artist -- 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers (New Artist) Chart, 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 1 on Billboard's World Music charts. In 2008, CéU received a Grammy nomination for “Best Contemporary World Music Album” of 2007 for her debut album CéU.
