Flora is well-known to all. For over 25 years, Flora’s music has been woven into the lives of all those who have even a passing interest Latin and American jazz music. She has been nominated twice for Grammys as Best Female Jazz Performance and Downbeat magazine’s Best Female Singer. Since moving from Rio de Janeiro to New York with Stan Getz in 1967, her musical partners were Gil Evans, Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie. Her musical talent was inbred by a Russian Jew emigre dad who played violin and a talented mother who was also a pianist. She had previously learned piano and guitar, and was able to unleash her exhilarating vocal talents before she fled Brazil’s repressive military regime. She and Airto were central to New York’s period of musical expression, creativity, and the creation of the first successful commercially-recognized Electric Jazz bands of the 1970s. Blue Note musician Duke Pearson invited Flora to sing onstage and on tape. Gil Evans was her next tour partner. She says that he has truly changed her life. He was a great support for us to do the most crazy things. For me, this was the beginning. She was a great performer and she worked with Stan Getz and Chick Corea as part of the New Jazz movement. This movement also included the nurturing influence Cannonball Adderley, a sax player. Flora began to work hard to re-educate musical minds. She teamed up with Joe Farrell, Stanley Clarke, Flora and Chick Corea to create “Return To Forever” late in 1971. Two albums, “Return to Forever”, and “Light as a Feather”, were released. These albums are pivotal in the development of fusion music. Chick chose to continue down the electric road. Flora and Airto decided their own route. Airto had by this point already made his own legend playing with Miles Davis, and before he helped to start the jazz wellspring “Weather Report”. In 1973, Butterfly Dreams, her first solo album, was released in the US. It placed her in the Top Five Jazz Singers of the Downbeat Magazine Fame Jazz Poll. Flora was a part of some of the most important recordings of the seventies, including those by Carlos Santana (Hermeto Pascoal), Gil Evans, Chick Corea, Gil Evans, Chick corea, and Mickey Hart. Flora and Airto re-established their musical partnership in the mid-Eighties to record two albums for Concord, “Humble People” (for which she was nominated for a Grammy), and “The Magicians”. She went one further in 1992, singing on two Grammy-winning albums: “Planet Drum” featuring Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead drummer (Best World Music Album), and “United Nations Orchestra” by Dizzy Gillespie (Best Jazz Album). Flora’s career was reborn with the launch of Fourth World, a highly-combustive Latin jazz band, in 1991, featuring Airto, Jose Neto, and Gary Meek (keyboards and reeds). The band signed to the new UK-based jazz label, B
