Born in Franca, São Paulo in 1980, Diego Figueiredo is a Grammy-nominated Brazilian jazz guitarist, producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist. Throughout his prolific career, Figueiredo has collaborated with some of the most iconic artists in Brazilian music, including Gilberto Gil and Toquinho, and played alongside jazz legends such as Larry Coryell, Terrel Stafford, and Dick Hyman. The son of a guitar player and grandson of a pianist, he developed a passion for music from a very early age, picking up the mandolin at age 6 and mastering several instruments before settling on the guitar at the age of 12. By the time he was 15, Diego Figueiredo was already playing gigs at pubs and nightclubs around Brazil. He recorded his official studio debut, Diego Figueiredo Group (1999) when he was just 17, and then went on to release a string of highly-acclaimed Brazilian jazz albums like Segundas Intenções (2004), El Colibri (2005), and Hojas Secas (2007), a collection of bossa standards recorded with Mimi Arakaki and Alexandre Piu. During those years, he also became the first Brazilian musician to be awarded twice at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2005 and 2007. In 2009, he began a fruitful musical partnership with French singer Cyrille Aimée, which resulted in the albums Smile (2009) and Just the Two of Us (2010). In subsequent years, Diego Figueiredo released the collaborative albums Zibididi (2011) with Gabriel Grossi, Duô (2015) with Chico Oliveira, and Violões Contemporâneos (2017) with Luiz Caldas. His first Grammy nomination arrived in 2020 for his arrangements on “Marry Me a Little,” featured on Cyrille Aimée’s 2019 album Move On: A Sondheim Adventure.
