Brazil’s Immortal Diva Elza Soares Vows To Sing Until End

The emaciated teenager from a Rio favela, dressed in her mother’s clothes held tight by pins, showed up in 1953 at a radio studio. She wanted to sing in return for cash to buy medicine for her sick baby.

“And what planet do you come from?” the program’s host, famous composer Ary Barroso, asked mockingly to the audience’s laughter.

“From Planet Hunger,” the teenager, Elza Soares, replied, bringing silence to the crowd.

Minutes later, after hearing Soares sing, the astonished conductor declared the birth of a star.
“I haven’t forgotten that exchange. I can’t forget it,” Soares, now 79, told AFP.

“I felt sad. I was a poor girl who was poorly dressed. I just sang well,” said Soares, her voice hollow after a life full of pain as well as success.

Soares spoke by telephone before singing Friday in New York at Town Hall as part of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival.

The show was based on “A Mulher do Fim Do Mondo” (“A Woman from the End of the World”), her Latin Grammy-winning 2015 album with previously unreleased tracks that offers a futuristic, even gothic, take on her samba with art-rock backdrops and electronic effects.

Dressed in black with a blonde afro that has made some call her the Brazilian Tina Turner, Soares performed sitting, as she has for some time.

But she still managed to rouse the audience out of its seats as she reached into her voice’s gutteral depths on classics such as “Malandro” (“Hustler”) and “A Carne” (“Meat”), with its line: “The cheapest meat on the market is black meat.”

“Black! Black! Black!” she screamed at the end, to which an audience member shouted back, “Wonderful black!”

The show culminated in calls by audience members for the impeachment of Brazil’s center-right President Michel Temer in his corruption scandal.

After the curtains closed, Soares shouted: “Direct, already!” backing calls for direct elections in a country whose previous president Dilma Rousseff was impeached.

After New York, Soares will perform in Barcelona, Porto and Rotterdam as well as at Denmark’s Roskilde rock festival.