Purim opens strange, sensuous world

We all had fruit crates: Splintery wood, stapled labels with oranges and melons and maidens, and, inside, hundreds of record albums, which were – even as the crates became cases of cassettes and boxes of CDs – vital to who we were and whom we might become.

It was the mid-’70s. I was in flux – and so were my teen friends. Our daily herbal intake, supposed to unravel mysteries, instead eroded our minimal stability. Our bodies were maturing faster than our brains. (Mine still is, if maturation includes decay.) We were trying to climb a ladder, but didn’t know rung from mist, and the crates held a cornucopia of archetypes, albeit based on the life wisdom of 25-year-old musicians.

I was lucky with music. The DJs at KTIM in San Rafael, California, played whatever amused them, and often seemed as gleefully high as their listeners. Lots of rock – later to become classic rock, but, at the time, the opposite: revolutionary not entrenched – but also Gato Barbieri and Norton Buffalo and Mose Allison and Jesse Colin Young. Perhaps not unexpectedly, it’s the weird stuff that I still listen to. Topping that list is Flora Purim.

Flora sings mainly in Portuguese. She has a six-octave range that goes from dark velvet to warm bath to a piercing squeal that makes you want to cower, or undress. After hearing her on KTIM, I raced out and got “Stories to Tell.”

The 1974 album includes such top jazz musicians as percussionist Airto Moreira (her husband), Ron Carter, Earl Klugh, Carlos Santana and George Duke. The title song kicks off with “Here I come from the other side/Thousands of stories to tell.” She leaves listeners agape with her sinuous vocals on McCoy Tyner’s “ Search for Peace,” and turns Brazilian composers Jobim and Nascimento into shimmering jazz fusion.

But then – in all of her albums and many of her songs, there’s always a “but then” – she and Airto decide to forsake commercial success and wander into entropy.

The last song is “ O Cantador/I Just Want to Be Here.” It begins with keyboard, chimes and vocals sultry enough to make the wallpaper slowly peel down. Halfway through, the band stops. The congas start. Flora makes small rhythmic sounds of pleasure, like she’s getting a massage – we all see different things – keyboard and cymbals come in, the song speeds up, and Flora sings.

What she doesn’t sing is, “I’m going to rock you all night long.” She doesn’t sing, “If you’re into evil, you’re a friend of mine” or “There’s a red house over yonder.” Instead, she sings, “Yesterday I went to the moon. It was high, high, high, high, high. The sun was so warm. The sun. The sun.” She abandons language, starts to scat. The band abandons melody, begins to improvise. Flora’s voice rises into a new octave, high-pitched and feline, alien and transporting. Then, as the song fades, she sings, over and over, “I just want to be here.”

God knows what my parents thought when music from Brazil/outer space came from my room. Maybe they were glad it wasn’t the Bee Gees. Maybe that’s why they so often took their drinks outside. But, for me, it was irresistible: Wildly experimental, sensual rather than sexual, superbly performed, and with no pretense of being helpful. It cavorted between beauty and insanity. It reveled in self-indulgence. It inspired one to accept without analyzing, to delight in chaos, and to believe that one’s own path was worth following – no matter what the critics said.