Daniela Mercury breaks the barrier as the first axé music artist to win the Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement

Daniela Mercury receives the Musical Excellence Award at a ceremony scheduled for November 9th at the 27th Latin Grammy Awards
Célia Santos / Disclosure
♫ OPINION
♬ Giving Daniela Mercury the Musical Excellence Award (Lifetime Achievement Award) at the 27th edition of the Latin Grammy Awards - at a ceremony scheduled for November 9th in Las Vegas, in the United States - is the right decision and in a way even history of the Latin Recording Academy.
After all, the award has already been given to names such as Ivan Lins, Lulu Santos and Simone, to name just the Brazilians honored in recent years, but until now an artist associated with axé music had never won this award, which symbolizes a laurel for the body of work, for the trajectory followed by this artist in the world of music.
Singer who expanded the reach of samba-reggae throughout Brazil in the early 1990s and who spread Afro-Bahian music beyond national borders, Daniela Mercury deserves this honor.
In addition to having contributed substantially to the discography of axé music - a generic label that encompasses several musical genres of Bahian or Caribbean origin - with relevant albums such as "O canto da Cidade" (1992), "Feijão com arroz" (1996), "Sol da Liberdade" (2000) and "Balé mulato" (2005), the Bahian singer and composer remained faithful to the musical universe of axé after its heyday of the genre.
In the current 2020s, for example, Daniela released three studio albums - "Perfume" (2020), "Baiana" (2022) and "Cirandaia" (2025) - which kept the axé flag flying. "Cirandaia", in particular, proved to be the artist's most cohesive and relevant album in the last 20 years. By giving voice to songs like "Axé Salvador" and "É terreiro", Daniela showed that, just like Bahia, axé is still alive there, especially during Carnival, even though the genre is far from its glory days.
Not to mention that the Musical Excellence Award at the 27th Latin Grammy Awards comes to Daniela Mercury in the year in which the artist completes four decades of professional activity.
It was in 1986 that, after performing in bars in her hometown of Salvador (BA), the singer officially entered the scene, first as a backing vocalist for the block Eva (in which she remained until 1988), then as a vocalist for the band Companhia Clic between 1989 and 1990 and, finally, in a solo career launched in 1991, 35 years ago, with the release of the album that brought the samba-reggae "Swing da color".
Over these 40 years, Daniela Mercury has emphasized activism and valued Afro-pop-Bahian music, the popular axé music always so minimized by cultural elites because it is popular music with a revelry spirit, based on rhythm, in the crazy grooves that draw crowds behind electric trios and into concert halls.
It is precisely because axé has always been treated with disdain that Daniela Mercury breaks barriers by winning the 2026 Latin Grammy Award for Musical Excellence.

Source: G1