Before Airto Moreira became a 2026 NEA Jazz Master, he had already helped reshape the sound of modern jazz.
The Brazilian percussionist arrived in New York in the late 1960s and quickly became part of an extraordinary run of music: the early electric bands of Miles Davis, Weather Report and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, as well as a series of albums under his own name that brought Brazilian rhythm, voice and instrumentation into the centre of American jazz.
Moreira was never simply the player adding colour at the edge of the bandstand. His percussion helped change the texture and momentum of jazz fusion at the point the style was being invented — while his own records brought together musicians including Flora Purim, Hermeto Pascoal, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, George Benson and Herbie Hancock.
The National Endowment for the Arts recognised that contribution by naming him a 2026 NEA Jazz Master. These eight albums, listed chronologically, show why: four as a leader, and four with the groups that made him central to one of jazz’s most inventive periods.
Airto – Natural Feelings (1970)
Recorded at A&R Recording Studios in New York and released on Skye Records, Natural Feelings was Moreira’s first album as a leader, produced by Gary McFarland and Bob Small.
It reassembled several of the Brazilian musicians he’d arrived in the US with, Hermeto Pascoal on piano, organ, harpsichord and flute, Flora Purim on vocals, guitarist Sivuca, plus Ron Carter on bass, and set a template Moreira would return to across the decade: small-group Brazilian writing folded into an American jazz session rather than presented as a separate, exotic import.
It arrived in the same period he began working with Miles Davis’s band, and the two strands of his early American career, sideman and leader, effectively started together.
Miles Davis – Miles Davis at Fillmore (1970)
Recorded live over four nights at the Fillmore East in June 1970 and released that October on Columbia, this document of Davis’s touring electric band credited Moreira on cuíca, flute, whistle, kazoo, shakers, bells, woodblock and tambourine, alongside Steve Grossman, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.
Moreira’s connection to this era of the Davis band is sometimes rounded up to include the original Bitches Brew LP itself, but his credited appearance there is on “Feio,” a track that surfaced only on later reissues; Fillmore is the clearest studio-adjacent evidence of what he actually brought to Davis’s group, a layer of hand percussion and found sound that had no precedent in Davis’s earlier acoustic bands.
Weather Report – Weather Report (1971)
Moreira played percussion on Weather Report’s self-titled debut, recorded in New York in February and March 1971 and released that May on Columbia alongside the band’s founders Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitouš, plus drummer Alphonse Mouzon.
He left before the group’s second album, Sweetnighter, which brought in percussionists Dom Um Romão and Muruga Booker. By then, Moreira’s solo career and outside-session work were already becoming increasingly demanding.
Brief as his tenure was, his presence on Weather Report’s debut placed him at the birth of another major fusion group just as his work with Return to Forever was approaching.
Chick Corea – Return to Forever (1972)
Recorded at A&R Studios in New York on February 2 and 3, 1972, for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label, this self-titled album credited Moreira on drums and percussion rather than hand percussion alone, alongside Chick Corea on Fender Rhodes, Stanley Clarke on bass, Joe Farrell on flute and soprano sax, and Flora Purim on vocals.
It was this session, not the later electric version of the band, that introduced pieces like “La Fiesta” and gave the group its name, and Moreira’s role as a full-kit player here shows a side of his musicianship that his reputation as a specialist hand percussionist tends to obscure.
The same rhythm section, plus Purim, would reconvene weeks later for Moreira’s own album Free.
Airto – Free (1972)
Produced by Creed Taylor for CTI and recorded at Van Gelder Studio across sessions in March and April 1972, Free is widely regarded as Moreira’s key statement as a leader, built around a lineup that reads like a fusion supergroup: Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett on keyboards, George Benson on guitar, Ron Carter and Stanley Clarke on bass, Joe Farrell and Hubert Laws on reeds, and Flora Purim on vocals.
Its opening track, a Corea composition titled “Return to Forever,” was recorded some seven weeks after Corea had already cut a version of it under his own name for the ECM album that gave the band its name.
The record reached number thirty on Billboard’s jazz albums chart and remains the release most often cited when critics discuss Moreira’s own musical identity apart from the bands he supported.
Return to Forever – Light as a Feather (1973)
Recorded at IBC Studio in London in October 1972 and released the following January on Polydor, Light as a Feather paired the same Corea-Clarke-Farrell-Purim-Moreira lineup from the group’s ECM debut with a set of tunes that included “Spain,” built around an introduction drawn from Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and later covered by more musicians than almost any other jazz-fusion composition of the era.
The album won Playboy’s 1972 Jazz Album of the Year and reached number six on Billboard’s jazz chart. It was the last album by this specific lineup before Corea rebuilt the band around Bill Connors and, later, Al Di Meola, in a harder-edged electric direction that left Moreira and Purim behind.
Airto – Fingers (1973)
Recorded at Van Gelder Studio in April 1973, again for Creed Taylor’s CTI label, Fingers largely replaced the American fusion names of Free with the Uruguayan group Opa, Hugo and Jorge Fattoruso and bassist Ringo Thielmann, alongside Flora Purim and guitarist David Amaro.
It reached number eighteen on Billboard’s jazz albums chart, an improvement on Free’s chart position, and AllMusic’s retrospective review called it consistently enriching.
Positioned between Free and 1974’s Virgin Land, it shows Moreira using his CTI contract to keep pulling South American musicians into the American jazz mainstream rather than leaning further into the all-star fusion format that had worked commercially the year before.
Airto Moreira – Identity (1975)
Co-produced by Moreira and Herbie Hancock for Arista, Identity brought Hancock in on synthesizer alongside Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, pianist Egberto Gismonti, trombonist Raul de Souza and, again, Flora Purim on vocals.
It marked a shift toward the more electronic textures Hancock himself was exploring in the mid-1970s, applied to Moreira’s Brazilian rhythmic base rather than replacing it.
Coming three years after Free, it’s a useful marker of how far Moreira’s address book had grown since arriving in New York in 1968: from a percussionist Miles Davis’s camp had to be introduced to, to a bandleader who could bring Davis’s former sidemen into his own sessions on his own terms.
Moreira’s name can easily get lost in the credits on records by Miles Davis, Weather Report or Return to Forever. But these albums make the case for hearing him as more than a remarkable sideman: a bandleader with his own sound, and a musician whose Brazilian background changed the way several major American jazz groups heard rhythm.
If you know only the famous albums, start with Natural Feelings or Free.
