Collection: Flora Purim

Flora Purim grew up singing bossa nova in the nightclubs of Rio and São Paulo, and her 1964 debut "Flora É M.P.M." sounds almost nothing like the singer she'd become. The transformation happened after she moved to New York in 1968 with her husband, percussionist Airto Moreira, and started turning up at after-hours jam sessions with Stan Getz, Gil Evans and Duke Pearson, absorbing an improvisational language well outside the bossa nova songbook she'd grown up on. When Chick Corea needed a singer and a percussionist for a new fusion project in 1971, Purim brought Moreira along, and the resulting band, Return to Forever, made her one of the defining voices of jazz fusion almost overnight. Her wordless vocals on "Return to Forever" (ECM, 1972) and "Light as a Feather" (Polydor, 1972), the latter featuring "500 Miles High", remain among the most distinctive vocal performances in the genre. She left to record solo for Milestone, starting with "Butterfly Dreams" (1973) and "Stories to Tell" (1974), and despite an 18-month prison sentence in 1974 and 1975 that interrupted her momentum, she emerged with four DownBeat Best Female Jazz Vocalist awards to her name. What's stocked here spans her early Brazilian work through to the Milestone solo records that built her reputation.