In 1978, Bruce Meyer of UPI called Flora Purim “the most popular jazz singer in the United States, which is to say she is the top jazz singer in the world.” As the muse of the fusion movement, Purim, a Brazilian with a Jewish name, was a wild bird, flapping its wings in a jungle of electronics and psychedelia. She pushed her girlish voice to its limits, scatting in daredevil unison with instruments, letting out guttural growls and ear-splitting squeaks, hopping deftly through minefields of shifting meters. In accented English, she sang of reaching a nirvana “five hundred miles high” where “your love stays so free that it can never die.” Egging her on was her “old man,” percussionist Airto Moreira, known simply as Airto. Barechested and bearded, he conjured voodoo-like spells with his array of animal bones and objects; sometimes he babbled as though speaking in tongues.
Unleashed on the world by Chick Corea and his seminal fusion group Return to Forever, Purim and Moreira were the genre’s rock-star couple. Purim’s work, says the Rio-based music producer Arnaldo DeSouteiro, “was more modern than anything in Brazilian music.” Yet like Astrud Gilberto, whose languid but vacant murmur had turned “The Girl from Ipanema” into a fabled symbol of Rio, Purim was a U.S. creation. “I’m not a Brazilian singer,” she explained. “I’m a jazz singer, and jazz is American.”
That stance did not endear her to Brazil; to this day her birth country barely knows her. And if her career resulted from meeting the right people, she also fell in with the wrong ones. A singer who chanted, “I am free! I am free!” wound up in jail, convicted of drug possession with intent to sell.
Now 80, Purim is finally home in Brazil, not by choice. This past spring, the U.K. record label Strut issued her first studio album in 17 years. If You Will is a slick mélange of samba, space-age synth, and choral overdubs; Flora, now calmer and slower, offers her trademark panaceas—“In the clarity of this life/Miracles happen every day”—while letting her daughter and costar, singer Diana Purim, handle the fireworks.
triggered a deluge of interview requests, proving that Purim’s myth, with all its contradictions and vaguenesses, is far from forgotten.
