Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo (September 13, 1922 – November 1, 2008), known as Yma Sumac ("Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua), was a Peruvian-born vocalist, actress, model, musical composer and producer. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. She has also been called Queen of Exotica and is considered a pioneer of world music. Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", was a big seller in the United Kingdom, becoming an international success in the 1950s. Albums like Legend of the Sun Virgin (1952), Fuego del Ande (1959) and Mambo! (1955), named "double voice" or "triple coloratura". and Lewisohn Stadium. In 1960 she became the first Latin American woman to get a phonograph record star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Afterwards she toured the Soviet Union, selling more than 20 million tickets. Sumac had more than 3,000 concerts "covering the entire globe",
Early life
Sumac was born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo on September 13, 1922, in Callao. with Moises Vivanco in a religious festival at Callao. of Peruvian folk songs in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1943. These early recordings for the Odeon label featured composer Moisés Vivanco's troupe Compañía Peruana de Arte, of 16 Peruvian dancers, singers, and musicians. and signed by Capitol 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 the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.
In 1950, she made her first tour to Europe and Africa, and debuted at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Royal Festival Hall before the future Queen 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 of lounge music featuring Hollywood-style arrangements of Incan and South American folk songs, working with Les Baxter and Billy May. The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences. Sumac appeared in a Broadway musical, Flahooley, in 1951, as a foreign princess who brings Aladdin's lamp to an American toy factory to have it repaired. The show's score was by Sammy Fain and Yip 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 of Barbara Cook.
The 1950s were the years of Sumac's greatest popularity; She played Carnegie Hall, the Roxy Theatre with Danny Kaye, Las Vegas nightclubs and concert tours of South America and Europe. She put out a number of hit albums for Capitol Records, such as Mambo! (1954) and Fuego del Ande (1959). During the height of Sumac's popularity, she appeared in the films Secret of the Incas (1954) with Charlton Heston and Robert Young, and Omar Khayyam (1957).<!-- -->
thumb|300x300px|Comparison of vocal octave ranges
She became a U.S. citizen on July 22, 1955. In 1959, she performed Jorge Bravo de Rueda's classic song "Vírgenes del Sol" on her album Fuego 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 the Soviet Union for over six months, and a film was shot recording some moments of the tour, and afterward throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. Their performance in Bucharest, Romania, was recorded as the album Recital, her only live in concert record. Sumac spent the rest of the 1960s performing sporadically.
Personal life
thumb|Sumac (right) with Vivanco and Rivero, 1947
She married Moisés Vivanco on June 6, 1942. 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 writer José María Arguedas (La Prensa, 1944). In 1946, Sumac and Vivanco moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inka Taqui Trio, Sumac singing soprano, Vivanco on guitar, and her cousin, Cholita Rivero, singing contralto and dancing. The group was unable to attain any success; however, their participation in the South American Music Festival in Carnegie Hall was reviewed positively. In 1949, Yma gave birth to their only child, Carlos.
Vocal range
She had five octaves according to some reports, but other reports (and recordings) document four-and-a-half at the peak of her singing career. Shortly after her death, the BBC noted that a typical trained singer has a range of about three octaves.
In 1954, composer and music critic Virgil 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." and had a number of concerts both in the United States and abroad, including the Hollywood Roosevelt Cinegrill, New York's Ballroom in 1987 (where she was held over for seven weeks to standing-room only crowds) and several San Francisco shows at the Theatre on the Square among others.
In 1987, she recorded "I Wonder" from the Disney film Sleeping Beauty for Stay Awake, an album of songs from Disney movies, produced by Hal Willner. She sang "Ataypura" during a March 19, 1987, appearance on Late 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 the BRT's "Gala van de Gouden Bertjes" New Year's Eve TV special in Brussels as well as the "Etoile Palace" program in Paris hosted by Frederic Mitterrand. In March 1990, she played the role of Heidi in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, in Long Beach, California, her first attempt at serious theater since Flahooley in 1951.
She also gave several concerts in the summer of 1996 in San Francisco and Hollywood as well as two more in Montreal, Canada, in July 1997 as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. In 1992, she declined to appear in a documentary for German television entitled Yma Sumac – Hollywoods Inkaprinzessin (Yma Sumac – Hollywood's Inca Princess). "Gopher Mambo" is used as the opening song in the British version of the television series Ten Percent.
On May 6, 2006, Sumac flew to Lima, where she was presented the Orden del Sol award by Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo and the Jorge Basadre medal by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Death
Sumac died on November 1, 2008, aged 86, at an assisted living home in Los Angeles, California, nine months after being diagnosed with colon cancer. She was interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the "Sanctuary of Memories" section.
On September 13, 2016, a Google Doodle depicted Sumac.
On September 20, 2022, a new memorial bust statue was unveiled at her final resting place, at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in honor of what would have been her 100th birthday.
Myths
Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa. The government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor.
For years, rumors circulated that Sumac was a housewife from Brooklyn whose real name was "Amy Camus", which she reversed to become Yma Sumac.
Discography
A 1943 recording session in Argentina included 23 songs, released on 78 rpm on Odeon Records. Sumac's 1952 album Legend 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.
Albums
- Voice of the Xtabay (Capitol, 1950)
- Legend of the Sun Virgin (Capitol, 1952)
- Inca Taqui (Capitol, 1953)
- Mambo! (Capitol, 1954)
- Legend of the Jivaro (Capitol, 1957)
- Fuego Del Ande (Capitol, 1959)
- Recital (Electrecord, 1961)
- Miracles (London, 1971)
Compilations
- The Spell of Yma Sumac (Pair, 1987)
- Amor Indio (Saludos Amigos, 1994)
- Shou Condor (Promo Sound, 1997)
- The Ultimate Yma Sumac Collection (Capitol, 2000)
- Virgin of the Sun God (Old Fashion, 2002)
- The Exotic Sounds of Yma Sumac (Sounds of the World, 2002)
- Queen of Exotica (Universe, 2005)
Filmography (partial)
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! 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"
|}
Accolades and honors
{| class="wikitable"
!Year
!Ceremony/Award
!Category/Notes
!Result
!
|-
| 1993
| Diamond Halo
| Contributions to entertainment
| style="background:lightyellow;" |
|align="center"|
|-
| 1960
| Guinness World Records
| Greatest Range
| style="background:lightyellow;" |
|align="center"|
|-
| 1960
| Hollywood Walk of Fame
| Walk of Stars
| style="background:lightyellow;" |
|align="center"|
|}
References
Notes
Further reading
- Garth Cartwright, "Yma Sumac – Peruvian-born singer marketed in the US as an Inca princess", obituary in The Guardian, November 16, 2008.
- Carolina A Miranda, "On the trail of Yma Sumac: the exotica legend comes from Peru but her career was all Hollywood" in The Los Angeles Times of March 23, 2017. Accessed 2017-04-19.
External links
- Yma Sumac, August 8, 1950. Malibu, Hollywood Bowl, Recording Studio, Residence (90 photos), by Peter Stackpole for LIFE magazine
Videos
- , (Jorge Bravo de Rueda)