Her Voice Is In The Air
Flora Purim's voice echoes through the music of the last half-century as if generated by the atmosphere. The often wordless, rhythmic, deeply free style the Brazilian singer pioneered is the astrological air element connecting samba to rock and be-bop to jazz fusion. Her singing energizes landmark recordings with Chick Corea, George Duke and Airto Moreira, the percussionist who is also her husband and lifelong musical partner. At the height of her success during American music's renewed love affair with Brazil in the mid-1970s, this earthy woman with the voice of a bird, a cloud, a butterfly — all images invoked on albums with titles like Light As a Feather, as marketers tried to capture the floating precision of her technique — had the most lucrative recording deal in jazz and an unquenchable desire to keep moving. She could fly: "I am trying to create a kind of music that goes beyond jazz, that is universal," she told journalist Larry Rohter in 1977. "I am looking for something that recognizes no barriers, no flags, no languages." Her adventurousness would take her beyond jazz and back again many times and crown her as the rarest kind of singer: often imitated, rarely if ever matched.
In 2022, the 80-year-old Purim's presence within popular music history is pervasive, yet somehow remains ethereal. Younger artists like Moonchild and Zara McFarlane are bringing back the light-stepping approach Purim has long embodied, and on the corner where jazz meets hip-hop, the fusion era when she was the undisputed queen of jazz (winning DownBeat magazine's prize for Best Vocalist four times) is a constant touchpoint. Now it's time for Purim's huge influence to be fully acknowledged. A new solo album — her first in 15 years and, she says, her final one — offers an occasion to consider her legacy in full. Anyone who begins that deep dive will wonder why her remarkable life and work hasn't already received the fervid reassessment others of her generation have recently enjoyed.
Her own retreat into a quieter life may have partially delayed Purim's revival, in the U.S. at least. Having returned to Brazil from the U.S. a decade ago, she was content working behind the scenes as a producer and collaborator until Roberta Cutolo, an Italian DJ and producer, persuaded her that the atmosphere needed her high notes again. "I'd already finished my singing career," Purim told me over Zoom from her home in Curitiba. "She said, 'Really, Flora, you have to do it. People are asking when there will be a new release!' She insisted and insisted."
steps forward by grounding itself in Purim's six decades of musical wanderlust; combining mostly new songs with a few brilliantly reworked favorites from her catalog, it makes the case for her continued relevance and vitality. That's not so hard to do once you start to connect the contrails. Jazz fans know of Purim's crucial role in the fusion movement of the 1970s, but may have lost track of her after she turned toward music more rooted in indigenous rhythms in the 1980s. She's an icon among Brazilian artists, but spent half her life in the U.S. and never settled into the lanes defined by either or its insurgent younger cousin, . From the 1990s to the present day, her solo work and recordings with Airto have been carried to new ears by hip-hop samplers and DJ's, especially on European dance floors,
