If you've ever listened to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew (1970) and wondered what that clattering, buzzing, half-hidden layer of noise underneath the drums was, that's Airto. He grew up in southern Brazil playing percussion instruments most Americans still can't name — the berimbau, the cuica, the agogô bells — and when he landed in the U.S. he didn't try to fit into the drum chair. He built a lane next to it.

Miles hired him for the Bitches Brew sessions and kept him around for a few years after, and it's not hard to hear why. Airto wasn't playing time, exactly. He was filling in the cracks — little scrapes, squeaks, and rattles that made the music feel alive and slightly dangerous, like the studio itself was breathing. That role, texture-maker rather than timekeeper, became his signature, and a lot of the jazz fusion that followed borrowed it without ever fully crediting where it came from.

He co-founded Chick Corea's Return to Forever with his wife, the singer Flora Purim, and that early lineup is where you hear his other gift: he could make Brazilian rhythm feel like it belonged in a jazz context without softening either side. Purim's voice floating over his percussion, with Corea's electric piano weaving through, gave fusion a lightness it didn't usually have. Most fusion from that era hits hard. Airto and Purim's version breathed.

He also spent time with Weather Report in their earliest days, and popped up on session after session through the '70s — Stan Getz, CTI Records dates, you name it. Producers wanted him because he could walk into any track and add color without stepping on anyone. That's a specific skill, and it's rarer than it sounds.

Airo never became a household name the way Miles or Corea did, but go back and listen to how much space he opens up in those recordings. He didn't reinvent jazz drumming so much as he expanded the vocabulary of what could sit next to it. If you want to understand how Brazilian music quietly worked its way into the DNA of American jazz fusion, start with him.