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The great Brazilian diva Flora Purim turns up the heat once more.
WHEN FLORA PURIM ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY in 1968 to launch her U.S. career, she felt enormous pressure to conform to the sex-kitten image that Astrud Gilberto had made all but mandatory for female Brazilian vocalists five years earlier, when she released her seductive version of "The Girl From Ipanema." Although the Rio de Janeiro-born Purim had to accept a few requisite bossa nova-style gigs to gain entry into Big Apple jazz circles, her mission from the beginning was to take Brazilian music in another direction. "I am not a bossa nova singer," she maintains to this day. "I never was. I'm a fusion singer."
Indeed, Purim's fame as a vocalist was solidified during the decade that became synonymous with the "fusion jazz" movement. But when she and her drummer/percussionist husband Airto Moreira joined pianist Chick Corea's Return To Forever band in 1972, it was more than the melding of jazz, funk, rock, and other styles that they had in mind. Introducing global audiences to the post-bossa generation of new Brazilian music was - and remains - their artistic mission.
Perpetual Emotion, Purim's current release on the Narada Jazz label, is a convincing bid by the singer who...