| Airto Moreira | |
| Birth Name: | Airto Guimorvan Moreira |
| Birth Date: | 5 August 1941 |
| Birth Place: | Itaiópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil |
| Genre: | Jazz, jazz fusion, Brazilian jazz, pop, baião |
| Occupation: | Musician, bandleader, composer |
| Instrument: | Drums, percussion |
| Years Active: | 1954–present |
| Label: | One Way, CTI, Arista, Warner Music Japan |
| Associated Acts: | Flora Purim, Return to Forever, Miles Davis, Hermeto Pascoal, Heraldo do Monte |
Airto Guimorvan Moreira (born August 5, 1941)[1] is a Brazilian jazz drummer, composer and percussionist.[2] He is married to jazz singer Flora Purim, and their daughter Diana Moreira is also a singer. Coming to prominence in the late 1960s as a member of the Brazilian ensemble Quarteto Novo, he moved to the United States and worked in jazz fusion with Miles Davis, Return to Forever, Weather Report and Santana.
Airto Moreira was born in Itaiópolis, Brazil,[1] into a family of folk healers, and raised in Curitiba and São Paulo. Showing an extraordinary talent for music at a young age, he became a professional musician at age 13, noticed first as a member of the samba jazz pioneers Sambalanço Trio and for his landmark recording with Hermeto Pascoal in Quarteto Novo in 1967. Shortly after, he followed his wife Flora Purim to the United States.
After moving to the US, Moreira studied with Moacir Santos in Los Angeles.[3] He then moved to New York where he began playing regularly with jazz musicians, including the bassist Walter Booker. Through Booker, Moreira began playing with Joe Zawinul, who in turn introduced him to Miles Davis.[1] At this time Davis was experimenting with electronic instruments and rock and funk rhythms, a form which was soon called jazz fusion.[1] Moreira participated in several of the most important projects of this emerging musical form,[1] and stayed with Davis for about two years.[4]
Shortly after leaving Davis, Moreira joined other Davis alumni Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous in their group Weather Report, playing percussion on their first album (1971).[1] He left Weather Report (replaced by Dom Um Romão and Muruga Booker for their Sweetnighter album) to join fellow Davis alumnus Chick Corea's new band Return to Forever.[1] He played drums on Return to Forever's first two albums: Return to Forever and Light as a Feather in 1972.
Moreira was a contributor to many of Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart's world music/percussion albums in Rykodisc's The World collection, including The Apocalypse Now Sessions, Däfos, Supralingua, and Planet Drum, which won a World Music Grammy in 1991. He can be heard playing congas on Eumir Deodato's 1970s space-funk hit "Also sprach Zarathustra" on the album Prelude.
Moreira has also played with several jazz musicians, including Cannonball Adderley, Lee Morgan, Paul Desmond, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Al Di Meola, Zakir Hussain, George Duke and Mickey Hart.
In addition to jazz concerts and recordings, he has composed and contributed music to film and television, played at the re-opening of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt[5] (along with fellow professor of ethnomusicology Halim El-Dabh[6]), and taught at UCLA and the California Brazil Camp.
In 1996, Moreira and his wife Flora Purim collaborated with P.M. Dawn on the song "Non-Fiction Burning" for the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
In 2022, it was announced via the Flora Purim & Airto Moreira Facebook page that Moreira was suffering severe health problems and that his wife Flora was now his full-time caregiver. Their daughter Niura established a GoFundMe page with the aim of raising funds to provide Moreira with funding for medical care.[7]
With Sambalanço Trio
With Fourth World