Airto Moreira
b. 5 August 1941, Itaiopolis, Brazil. Moreira moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was 16 years old. In the '60s he played in a quartet with the pianist/flautist Hermeto Pascal, travelling the length and breadth of Brazil collecting and using over 120 percussion instruments. He moved to Los Angeles in 1968 and then to New York in 1970. He was a musician who managed to be in the right place at the right time; jazz was being opened up to the kind of extra rhythmic subtlety a second percussionist could offer. Moreira describes how ‘you look and listen for your own place in the music—your own space—and then you start to make sounds …music is like a picture; it's not just sound’. He worked with Miles Davis in 1970 as he sought to establish the changes announced in BITCHES BREW. He played percussion on the Weather Report debut album in 1971 and then worked with Chick Corea's Return To Forever. Since then he has worked with tenor saxophonists Stan Getz and Gato Barbieri to the Grateful Dead's drummer Mickey Hart with whom he recorded the percussion soundtrack for Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. He worked most regularly with his wife Flora Purim. In the mid-'80s he played with the Al DiMeola Project, with which he came to Europe.