Yma Sumac | |
|---|---|
 Sumac in 1954 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo |
| Born | (1922-09-13)September 13, 1922 Callao, Peru |
| Died | November 1, 2008(2008-11-01) (aged 86) Los Angeles, United States |
| Genres | |
| Occupation | Singer |
| Years active | 1938–1976, 1984–1997 |
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (bornZoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo; September 13, 1922[1][2][3] – November 1, 2008), known asYma Sumac (orImma Sumack), was a Peruvian singer. She won aGuinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956.[4] "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" inQuechua.[5] She has also been called Queen ofExotica[6][7] and is considered a pioneer ofworld music.[8] Her debut album,Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in theBillboard 200,[9] selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on theUK Singles Chart,[10] becoming an international success in the1950s. Albums likeLegend of the Sun Virgin (1952),[11]Fuego del Ande (1959)[12] andMambo! (1955),[12] were other successes.
In 1951, Sumac became the first Latin American and Peruvian female singer to debut onBroadway.[8] In "Chuncho (The Forest Creatures)" (1953), she developed her own technical singing,[13] named "double voice"[14] or "triple coloratura".[13] During the same period, she performed inCarnegie Hall[15] andLewisohn Stadium.[16] In 1960 she became the first Latin American woman to get a phonograph record star[17] on theHollywood Walk of Fame.[18] Afterwards she toured theSoviet Union,[19] selling more than 20 million tickets.[19] According toVariety in 1974,[20] Sumac had more than 3,000 concerts "covering the entire globe",[20] breaking any previous records by a performer.[20] Fashion magazineV listed her as one of the 9 international fashion icons of all time in 2010.[21][3] She has sold over 40 million records, which makes her the best-selling Peruvian singer in history.[22][23][24]
Sumac was born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo on September 13, 1922 inCallao.[1][3] Then the family (amiddle class one) moved toCajamarca,[3] where she spent her childhood.[3][7] Her parents were the civic leader[7] Sixto Chávarri (Cajamarca)[1][3] and the schoolteacher[7] Emilia Castillo (Ancash).[1][3] Sumac was the youngest of six children.[3] Growing up with the air of the Andean mountains, imitating the birds and other animals,[7] she was "unintentionally making" her hugevocal range.[7] In 1934, she traveled to live inLima with her relatives.[3] After being privately tutored from the age of 5,[3] she entered aCatholic school in 1935.[3]
Probably Sumac's first public appearance was on August 16, 1938,[25] with Moises Vivanco in areligious festival at Callao.[25] She graduated high school in 1940.[3] She recorded at least 18 tracks[26] of Peruvian folk songs inBuenos Aires, Argentina in 1943. These early recordings for theOdeon label featured composer Moisés Vivanco's troupeCompañía Peruana de Arte, of 16 Peruvian dancers, singers, and musicians.[27]
She was discovered byLes Baxter[28] and signed byCapitol Records in 1950, at which time her stage name became Yma Sumac. Her first album,Voice of the Xtabay, launched a period of fame that included performances at theHollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.[29]
In 1950, she made her first tour to Europe and Africa, and debuted at theRoyal Albert Hall in London and theRoyal Festival Hall before the futureQueen of England. She presented more than 80 concerts in London and 16 concerts in Paris. A second tour took her to the Far East: Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Sumatra, the Philippines, and Australia. Her fame in countries like Greece, Israel and Russia made her change her two-week stay to six months. During the 1950s, she produced a series of best-selling recordings oflounge music featuringHollywood-style arrangements of Incan and South American folk songs, working withLes Baxter andBilly May. The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences. Sumac appeared in aBroadway musical,Flahooley, in 1951, as a foreign princess who bringsAladdin's lamp to an American toy factory to have it repaired. The show's score was bySammy Fain andYip Harburg, but her three numbers were the work of Vivanco, with one co-written by Vivanco and Fain.Flahooley closed quickly, but the Capitol recording of the show continues to sell well as a cult classic, in part because it also marked the Broadway debut ofBarbara Cook.[30]
The 1950s were the years of Sumac's greatest popularity; She playedCarnegie Hall, theRoxy Theatre withDanny Kaye,Las Vegas nightclubs and concert tours of South America and Europe. She put out a number of hit albums for Capitol Records, such asMambo! (1954) andFuego del Ande (1959).[31] During the height of Sumac's popularity, she appeared in the filmsSecret of the Incas (1954) withCharlton Heston and Robert Young, andOmar Khayyam (1957).[citation needed]
She became a U.S. citizen on July 22, 1955. In 1959, she performedJorge Bravo de Rueda's classic song "Vírgenes del Sol" on her albumFuego del Ande. In 1957 Sumac and Vivanco divorced, after Vivanco sired twins with another woman. They remarried that same year, but a second divorce followed in 1965. Apparently due to financial difficulties, Sumac and the original Inka Taky Trio went on a world tour in 1960, which lasted for five years. They performed in 40 cities in theSoviet Union for over six months, and a film was shot recording some moments of the tour,[32] and afterward throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. Their performance inBucharest, Romania, was recorded as the albumRecital, her only live in concert record. Sumac spent the rest of the 1960s performing sporadically.[33]
She married Moisés Vivanco on June 6, 1942.[27] After this date, Moisés and Yma toured South America and Mexico as a group of fourteen musicians called Imma Sumack and the Conjunto Folklorico Peruano. Some people in Peru did not appreciate her style of singing, most notably the writerJosé María Arguedas (La Prensa, 1944).[34] In 1946, Sumac and Vivanco moved toNew York City, where they performed as the Inka Taqui Trio, Sumac singingsoprano, Vivanco on guitar, and her cousin, Cholita Rivero, singingcontralto and dancing. The group was unable to attain any success; however, their participation in the South American Music Festival inCarnegie Hall was reviewed positively. In 1949, Yma gave birth to their only child, Carlos.[35]
She had fiveoctaves according to some reports,[36] but other reports (and recordings) document four-and-a-half at the peak of her singing career.[2][37] Shortly after her death, theBBC noted that a typical trained singer has a range of about three octaves.[38]
In 1954, composer and music criticVirgil Thomson described Sumac's voice as "very low and warm, very high and birdlike," noting that her range "is very close to five octaves, but is in no way inhuman or outlandish in sound."[2]
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Yma Sumac" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(October 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
In 1971, Sumac released arock album,Miracles. She performed in concert from time to time during the 1970s in Peru and later in New York at the Chateau Madrid andTown Hall. In the 1980s, she resumed her career under the management ofAlan Eichler,[39] and had a number of concerts both in the United States and abroad, including theHollywood Roosevelt Cinegrill, New York's Ballroom in 1987[40] (where she was held over for seven weeks to SRO crowds) and severalSan Francisco shows at the Theatre on the Square among others.In 1987, she recorded "I Wonder" from theDisney filmSleeping Beauty forStay Awake, an album of songs fromDisney movies, produced byHal Willner. She sang "Ataypura" during a March 19, 1987, appearance onLate Night with David Letterman. She recorded a new German "techno" dance record, "Mambo ConFusion".
In 1989, she sang again at the Ballroom in New York and returned to Europe for the first time in 30 years to headline theBRT's "Gala van de Gouden Bertjes" New Year's Eve TV special inBrussels as well as the "Etoile Palace" program in Paris hosted byFrederic Mitterrand. In March 1990, she played the role of Heidi inStephen Sondheim'sFollies, inLong Beach, California, her first attempt at serious theater sinceFlahooley in 1951.
She also gave several concerts in the summer of 1996 inSan Francisco and Hollywood as well as two more inMontreal, Canada, in July 1997 as part of theMontreal International Jazz Festival. In 1992, she declined to appear in a documentary for German television entitledYma Sumac – Hollywoods Inkaprinzessin (Yma Sumac – Hollywood's Inca Princess).[40] With the resurgence oflounge music in the late 1990s, Sumac's profile rose again when the song "Ataypura" was featured in theCoen Brothers filmThe Big Lebowski.[citation needed]
Her song "Bo Mambo" appeared in a commercial forKahlúa liquor and was sampled for the song "Hands Up" byThe Black Eyed Peas. The song "Gopher Mambo" was used in the filmsOrdinary Decent Criminal,Happy Texas,Spy Games, andConfessions of a Dangerous Mind, among others. "Gopher Mambo" was used in an act of the Cirque Du Soleil showQuidam, as a musical motif in the Russian showKukhnya (along with "Bo Mambo" and "Taki Rari"), and in an iPhone commercial in 2020. The songs "Goomba Boomba" and "Malambo No. 1" appeared inDeath to Smoochy. A sample from "Malambo No.1" was used in Robin Thicke's "Everything I Can't Have". Sumac is also mentioned in the lyrics of the 1980s song "Joe le taxi" byVanessa Paradis, and her albumMambo! is the record thatBelinda Carlisle pulls out of its jacket in the video for "Mad About You".[41] "Gopher Mambo" is used as the opening song in the British version of the television seriesTen Percent.
On May 6, 2006, Sumac flew toLima, where she was presented theOrden del Sol award by Peruvian PresidentAlejandro Toledo and theJorge Basadre medal by theUniversidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.[42]
Sumac died on November 1, 2008, aged 86, at an assisted living home in Los Angeles, California, nine months after being diagnosed withcolon cancer.[43] She was interred at theHollywood Forever Cemetery in the "Sanctuary of Memories" section.
On September 13, 2016, aGoogle Doodle depicted Sumac.[44]
On September 20, 2022, a new memorial bust statue was unveiled at her final resting place, at theHollywood Forever Cemetery, in honor of what would have been her 100th birthday.
Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was anIncan princess, directly descended fromAtahualpa. The government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor.[2] However, her biographer, Nicholas E. Limansky, claimed that her Incan royal origin was not true. "Hollywood took this nice girl who wanted to be a folk singer, dressed her up and said she was a princess. And she acted like it," according to Limansky.[45]
For years, rumors circulated that Sumac was a housewife fromBrooklyn whose real name was "Amy Camus", which she reversed to become Yma Sumac.[2] The origin of the rumor may plausibly be traced to a cleverly formulated review by influential jazz criticLeonard Feather, who used literary device, in a December 1950 column, to suggest that Sumac's voice was in fact atheremin, that Xtabay—or Axterbay—wasPig Latin forBaxter, and that the name of the singer was Amy Camus, who took Serutan (a contemporary laxative: "natures" spelled backwards).[46]
A 1943 recording session in Argentina included 23 songs, released on 78 rpm onOdeon Records.[47] Sumac's 1952 albumLegend of the Sun Virgin was reissued in 2020 (digitally and on vinyl records) by Madrid label Ellas Rugen (Ladies Who Roar) Records, dedicated to the greatest female Latin American singers of the second half of the 20th century.[48][49]
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1954 | Secret of the Incas | Kori-Tica | performs "Taita Inty", "Tumpa!", "Ataypura!" |
| 1957 | Omar Khayyam | Karina | performs "Lament" |
| 1958 | Música de siempre | Herself | performs "Chuncho" |
| 1960 | Las canciones unidas | Herself | performs "Taita Inty" |
| Year | Ceremony/Award | Category/Notes | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | Diamond Halo | Contributions to entertainment | Won | [50] |
| 1968 | Golden Disc of Hollywood Award | Best Latin American Singer | Won | [50] |
| 1960 | Guinness World Records | Greatest Range | Won | [51] |
| 1960 | Hollywood Walk of Fame | Walk of Stars | Won | [50] |
| 1997 | Life Achievement Award | — | Won | [50] |
| 2006 | Order of the Sun of Peru | Presented by Republic of Peru | Won | [52] |
Notes
GREATEST RANGE: Yma Sumac of Peru. She is reputed to have a range of five octaves from A # to B.
Further reading
Fate. Vol. 4, No. 8
Videos
