Legendary Purim still essence of true jazz

International star looks back at an extraordinary singing career

In recent years Flora Purim, the famed Brazilian jazz singer who takes the stage at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre Saturday night, has been reflecting on her life, from her childhood in Rio de Janeiro to her relocation to America in the late '60s and her rise as one of jazz music's top international stars.

"It's been about remembering the things I should have done, things I shouldn't have done and not feeling bad about it," she says of the process.

The life assessment is part of an upcoming project, an autobiography and companion documentary tentatively titled simply "Flora, Brasileira" ("a Brazilian woman"). In a sense Purim sees the story of her life as the story of her music. The albums she has made -- including 32 solo albums as well as dozens of works she has appeared on for other artists, including Cannonball Adderly, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, Carlos Santana, and her husband of 43 years, Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira -- are "photographs" in her scrapbook.

"When I was younger I was not as secure in myself as I am right now," Purim says of her development. "I don't do records to win prizes, and I realize that the record is a picture of a moment."

The earliest of these pictures, chronologically, is actually the 2002 reissue Flora É M.P.M., a compilation of some of Purim's early '60s Brazilian recordings. Though the record is one of the few she ever made in her native country, the music finds her perhaps the farthest from her homeland she has ever been. The 22-year-old singer modeled her performance on early jazz influences, like Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald, that she picked up from her mother's record collection.

"My father was Russian and a classically-trained violinist, and my mother played classical piano, but she used to listen to Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and all these great jazz musicians," Purim recalls of her Rio upbringing.

While singing for various Brazilian groups in the '60s, Purim met and fell in love with percussionist Moreira, better known simply by his first name Airto, which to this day he explains to audiences is pronounced "eye, ear, toe." The two have been steadfast collaborators ever since.

When a military dictatorship took over Brazil in 1964, Purim, whose original lyrics often contained political and social meaning, found herself among the many artists censored by the new regime. In the late '60s she and Airto left Brazil.

In 1967 the pair arrived in New York with the express intent of meeting all the American jazz masters they had admired from afar. On her second day there, Purim fought her way into Club Baron where Thelonious Monk was performing.

As she looked around the room she saw "Wayne Shorter at the bar, Art Blakey and Carmen McRae," Purim writes in an excerpt for her upcoming autobiography posted on her Web site. "Oh, Miles Davis came in grand style with a beautiful lady on his arm! Every single jazz musician I idolized was at that club that night. It was the hangout of the musicians in the late '60s and '70s."

Among the other musicians there that night were jazz bassist Walter Booker, whose son would go on to marry Purim's daughter, Diana. There was also a little known jazz pianist named Chick Corea, who would help change Purim's musical life forever.

In 1971 Corea formed the first Return to Forever, a landmark jazz-fusion group that included bassist Stanley Clarke, saxophonist Joe Farrell, Airto and Purim. After recording two highly acclaimed albums, Purim and Airto left RTF in 1973, the year Purim also released her solo debut Butterfly Dreams, recently reissued by Concord Music Group. The album crystallized Purim's vocal style, a seamless blend of American and Brazilian influences with Purim's wordless, unfettered improvisations at the center.

"Usually, I try to speak a song, not really sing it," Purim says of her approach to new material, typified in her recording of Clarke's classic "Light As A Feather." "I tell the story. Then later when I get to the solo sections, then I do distort everything and make my own changes."

Purim has continued this approach straight through to her most recent release, 2005's Flora's Song, an album that found her collaborating for the first time with her daughter and son-in-law.

"'Flora's Song' itself was one of the first songs I had written in the '70s, and it was the way I felt then," says Purim of the title track, a long, dense, wordless composition that unfolds like a rainforest tableaux and which was first recorded for an Airto album in the '70s. "I re-recorded it because it is how I have still felt through the years. It represents the end of a cycle and the beginning of another."

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/mar/07/legendary-purim-still-essence-of-true-jazz/