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      Taylor Swift Fan Falls Fatally Ill at Brazil Concert Amid Heat

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      Many fans fell sick at the show, where temperatures broke records and concertgoers complained of a lack of water. The pop star postponed Saturday’s show.One fan died and many others fainted at Taylor Swift’s concert on Friday in Rio de Janeiro, where temperatures felt like nearly 140 degrees Fahrenheit, a record for the city, and fans said they struggled to get water.Ana Clara Benevides, 23, lost consciousness at the concert and later was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest after being taken to the hospital, according to city officials and the Brazilian company organizing the show, Time for Fun.There were widespread complaints about the extreme heat and lack of water from fans inside the open-air soccer stadium, where Ms. Swift was performing for more than 60,000 people on Friday in the first of three sold-out shows in Rio this weekend as part of the South American stretch of her record-breaking Eras Tour.Hours before she was set to take the stage on Saturday night, Ms. Swift announced on social media that the show was being postponed because of the extreme temperatures in Rio.“The safety and well-being of my fans, fellow performers and crew has to and always will come first,” she wrote.Ms. Swift’s fans said on social media that they were prohibited from bringing water into the stadium on Friday, while other fans said vendors struggled to reach the people near the stage. Videos showed Ms. Swift throwing a water bottle to one fan and instructing stadium staff to get water to others as people in the crowd chanted for water.The tragedy paired two of the year’s major story lines: rising temperatures and the hysteria for Ms. Swift’s global tour.In Argentina, where Ms. Swift played last week, some fans camped out for more than five months to try to get a spot closer to the stage. In Brazil, a day after Ms. Benevides’s death, fans lined up early for entry to Saturday’s show even as temperatures continued to soar. It is the second show Ms. Swift has had to postpone because of extreme weather in the past week — her Nov. 10 show in Buenos Aires was moved to Nov. 12.In an online post, Ms. Swift said she was “devastated” by her fan’s death. “I’m not going to be able to speak about this from stage because I feel overwhelmed by grief when I even try to talk about it,” she said.A fan waiting for entry into the Taylor Swift concert in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday lay on the ground after the extreme heat made her feel sick.Pilar Olivares/ReutersWadih Damous, the head of Brazil’s consumer protection agency, said his agency had ordered the concert’s organizers to provide free water at various locations at Ms. Swift’s shows on Saturday and Sunday.“The decision to prevent thousands of people from drinking water in 60-degree Celsius heat is insane and irresponsible,” Mr. Damous said. He said the government would investigate Time for Fun.The company said on Saturday that it would add staff, provide free water and allow fans to enter the stadium with water and food.Parts of Brazil have been suffering under a sweltering heat wave this week, with temperatures breaking records and the national meteorological institute issuing safety alerts to 15 states. In Rio, temperatures surpassed 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or 41 degrees Celsius, on Friday. The heat index, a measure of how hot the air feels because of humidity, hit 139 degrees Fahrenheit, a record for the city.It appears almost certain that 2023 will be Earth’s hottest year on record, with global temperatures hitting record highs in each of the past five months, from June through October. Scientists have said that the year’s record heat has been driven by the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mostly from the burning of oil, gas and coal, as well as the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.Brazilian government institutions have said that since June, El Niño has changed the region’s weather patterns, increasing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near South America by three degrees Celsius, while bringing more rain to the south and droughts to the north.Felipe Galvão, 28, a systems analyst, was on the field level near the stage on Friday when people started getting sick from the heat even before the concert started. By the time the show began, so many people had gotten sick and left their places that he was able to reach the railing along the stage.“I’ve been going to concerts since 2011, but I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he said. “There was little staff and unfortunately they couldn’t do much for the fans. You could tell that even they were a little lost.”Paulo Motoryn More

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      Léa Garcia, Who Raised Black Actors’ Profile in Brazil, Dies at 90

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      Best known internationally for her breakout performance in the 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” she challenged racial stereotypes over a seven-decade career.Léa Garcia, a pioneering actress who brought new visibility and respect to Black actors in Brazil after her breakout performance in the Academy Award-winning 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” died on Aug. 15 in Gramado, a mountain resort town in southern Brazil. She was 90.Her death, of cardiac complications, was confirmed by her family on her Instagram account. At her death, in a hospital, she was in Gramado to receive a lifetime achievement award at that town’s film festival. Her son Marcelo Garcia, who was also her manager, accepted the honor in her place.Over a prolific career that began in the 1950s, Ms. Garcia amassed more than 100 credits in theater, film and television, from her early years with an experimental Black theater group to her later prominence on television productions, like the popular 1976 telenovela “Escrava Isaura” (“Isaura: Slave Girl”), based on an 1875 novel by the abolitionist writer Bernardo Guimarães; it was seen in more than 80 countries.Recounting her career in a 2022 interview with the Brazilian magazine Ela, Ms. Garcia said she felt blessed by her success. “I often say that the gods embraced me,” she said. “Things always arrived for me without me running after them.”Still, laboring to change racial perceptions in the world of film and television involved tremendous perseverance and discipline. “Much more was demanded of us,” she told Ela. “We had to arrive with the text on the tip of our tongue, always smelling good and elegant. Others could be wrong. We could not. We could play subservient characters, but we needed to show that we ourselves were not.”Léa Lucas Garcia de Aguiar was born on March 11, 1933, in Rio de Janeiro. Growing up, she was drawn to literature and aspired to be a writer. That changed one day in 1950.“I was on my way to pick up my grandmother to take her to the movies,” she recalled, “when someone came up to me and asked, ‘Would you like to work in theater?’”The voice belonged to Abdias do Nascimento, the writer, artist and Pan-Africanist activist who created Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), a Rio-based group that aimed to promote the appreciation of Afro-Brazilian culture. (The two would become a couple and had two children together.) Ms. Garcia made her stage debut in 1952 in Mr. Nascimento’s play “Rapsódia Negra” (“Black Rhapsody”).As the decade drew to a close, she took her career to a new level of international recognition when she was cast in the French director Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus,” a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice adapted to the frenzy of Rio’s carnival and featuring music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. It won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1960.With its lush exuberance, the film was anything but classical in feel. “It really is not the two lovers that are the focus of interest in this film; it is the music, the movement, the storm of color,” Bosley Crowther wrote in a review in The New York Times.Even in her 80s, Ms. Garcia remained productive. Adriano DamasEven in a supporting role, Ms. Garcia showed an ability to beguile. “Léa Garcia,” Mr. Crowther wrote, “is especially provoking as the loose-limbed cousin of the soft Eurydice.”Among her other notable films was “Ganga Zumba,” the debut feature by Carlos Diegues, a pioneer in Brazil’s reformist Cinema Novo movement, which was made in 1963 but not released until 1972. She brought power and complexity to the character of Cipriana, the lover of the title character, who escapes a sugar plantation in the 17th century to lead Quilombo dos Palmares, a haven for other fugitives from slavery.“It’s not shameful to be a slave,” Ms. Garcia often said, according to family members. “It’s shameful to be a colonizer.”The pace of her career scarcely slowed over the years; she spent decades as a staple of Brazilian soap operas like “O Clone” (“The Clone”), “Anjo Mau” (“Evil Angel”), “Xica da Silva” and “Marina,” and was seen on other TV series as well.Even in her 80s, Ms. Garcia remained productive. She starred in the drama series “Baile de Máscaras” in 2019 and returned to the stage in 2022 in the play “A Vida Não é Justa” (“Life Is Not Fair”), in which she played three characters and explored themes of diversity, equality, justice and relationships.Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.In the Ela interview, Ms. Garcia discussed her hopes for her great-great-granddaughter, who was 7 months old at the time. “I hope for a fair and egalitarian country that respects diversities,” she said. “That’s what I want, and much more.”Julia Vargas Jones contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil More

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      Leny Andrade, ‘First Lady of Brazilian Jazz,’ Dies at 80

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      With her soulful, cigarette-tinged contralto and emotive “bossa-jazz” stylings, she mesmerized audiences and critics alike.Leny Andrade, the Brazilian singer who earned an international following with her soulful fusion of samba, bossa nova and American jazz and whom Tony Bennett once called the Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil, died on July 24 in Rio de Janeiro. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, from pneumonia, was confirmed in a statement by a Rio retirement home for artists where she was living. She had also been treated for Lewy body dementia.Often referred to as “the first lady of Brazilian jazz,” Ms. Andrade (pronounced ahn-DRAH-jay) rose from the clubs of Rio, where she performed as a teenager, to forge a six-decade career, recording more than 35 albums as a pioneer of what she came to call bossa-jazz.In 2007, Ms. Andrade won a Latin Grammy Award for “Ao Vivo,” a live album with the celebrated Brazilian pianist César Camargo Mariano.“Leny is one of the greatest improvisers in the world,” Mr. Bennett, who died last month, once said. “I love the way she sings. She is an original.”Singing largely in Portuguese, Ms. Andrade brought a richness and emotional depth to icily cool bossa nova tracks, pulse-quickening sambas and soulful ballads, which she infused with a world-weary sultriness.In a review of her American debut in 1983 at the Blue Note jazz club in New York, John S. Wilson of The New York Times praised the emotive power she brought to “Cantador,” a ballad in the intense Edith Piaf tradition. “Miss Andrade sings it in a darker, softer voice than Piaf’s,” he wrote, “with a dramatic effect that comes through even to a listener who doesn’t understand Portuguese.”Ms. Andrade’s career took off in the United States in 1993 after she moved to New York, where she became a popular draw, performing at Birdland and other clubs, sometimes with Mr. Bennett and Liza Minnelli in the audience. The following year, she played at Lincoln Center as well as the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Her voice, a deep, woody contralto with a seen-it-all air, carried a hint of a rasp from her long love affair with cigarettes. The overall effect could be mesmerizing.“To describe Ms. Andrade as both the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald of bossa nova only goes so far in evoking a performer whose voice seems to contain the body and soul of Brazil,” Stephen Holden wrote when reviewing a 2008 New York club performance in The Times.“You may think you know ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’” he continued, but “you haven’t really absorbed it until you’ve heard Ms. Andrade sing it in Portuguese; disgorge might be a better word than sing, since, like everything else she performs, it seems to well up from the center of the earth.”For Ms. Andrade, singing brought sustenance. “My soul is everything I can offer the public,” she said in a 2013 interview with the Brazilian music site Esquina Musical. “When I open my mouth, any pain goes away. I sing without fear. My friends and enemies embrace me.”“When I sing,” she added, “I embark on a magic carpet out of here. I travel to Mars.”Leny de Andrade Lima was born in Rio on Jan. 26, 1943. Her father, Luiz de Oliveira Lima, and mother, Ruth Couto de Andrade, divorced when Leny was young. She grew up in Méier, a neighborhood in the city’s North Zone, a hotbed of samba.Mr. Andrade’s debut album, from 1961, drew from a moody samba sound of an earlier era. RCA VictorAt the urging of her mother, Ms. Andrade studied classical piano and singing starting at age 6. She earned a scholarship to the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. Beethoven and Brahms, however, were not her destiny.She became entranced with bossa nova (“new wave” in Portuguese), which fused traditional Brazilian rhythms with American jazz, as it emerged from the beaches of Brazil in the late 1950s. She was also influenced by the samba stylings of the popular Brazilian singer Dolores Durán.“I showed my piano diploma to my mother,” she said in a 2013 interview on Brazilian television, and told her, “‘Forget about opera, classical music. I will sing popular music — because of Dolores Durán.’”Her professional career began at 15, performing at dances with the bandleader Perminio Goncalves, chaperoned by her stepfather, Gustavo Paulo da Silva, since she was still a minor.She later sang with the Sérgio Mendes Trio, a jazz combo, before Mr. Mendes took his detour to international pop stardom with his band Brasil 66. “He said he hated samba; he didn’t play it,” Ms. Andrade told Esquina Musical. “And I said the same about jazz. But we ended up giving in and mixing the two.”She came to embrace jazz and its improvisational wordless singing style known as scat. (In his 1983 Times review, Mr. Wilson praised her scatting “agility that approaches Ella Fitzgerald.”)In 1961, Ms. Andrade released her first album, “A Sensação,” for RCA, moodily drawing from the samba of an earlier era. She hit her stride two years later, fusing bossa nova with traditional jazz on “A Arte Maior de Leny Andrade,” on Polydor.She was married briefly when she was younger and never had children. Information about survivors was not immediately available.As a jazz singer, Ms. Andrade never enjoyed roaring commercial success, but that fact did not disturb her. “I don’t make music for the masses,” she told Esquina Musical. “They don’t have the ability to understand my work. Bad stuff is not in my repertoire.”Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro More

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      João Donato, Innovative Brazilian Musician, Is Dead at 88

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      A prolific pianist, composer and arranger who began recording in the 1950s, he was a pioneer of bossa nova but didn’t confine himself to any genre.João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”Mr. Donato’s debut album, released in 1956, was produced by Antonio Carlos Jobim, another innovator of bossa nova.João Donato de Oliveira Neto was born on Aug. 17, 1934, in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. He began playing accordion and writing songs as a child. In 1945, he moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing professionally in his teens.Mr. Donato began leading his own groups in the early 1950s while also working as a sideman. He played accordion on Luiz Bonfá’s first album, released in 1955, as part of a studio band that also included Antonio Carlos Jobim. Mr. Jobim produced Mr. Donato’s debut album, “Chá Dançante” (1956), and Mr. Donato wrote songs with João Gilberto, including “Minha Saudade,” which became a Brazilian standard.But by the end of the 1950s, Mr. Donato’s preferred style had grown so complex that audiences complained that they couldn’t dance to it, and he had difficulty finding work in Brazil. He accepted a job backing Carmen Miranda at a Lake Tahoe resort, and relocated to the United States.As the 1960s began, he was welcomed by Latin and jazz musicians. He recorded with Cal Tjader, Astrud Gilberto (who died in June), Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Eddie Palmieri. (He played trombone in Mr. Palmieri’s La Perfecta, a brassy salsa band Mr. Palmieri called a “trombanga.”)The vibraphonist Dave Pike recorded an entire album of Mr. Donato’s compositions, “Bossa Nova Carnival,” in 1962, and the saxophonist Bud Shank put Mr. Donato in charge of his 1965 album, “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends.” “This is João Donato’s baby,” Mr. Shank wrote in the liner notes. “I’ve turned all the problems over to him and I just relax and play.”On his own albums for U.S. labels, Mr. Donato drew on jazz and Caribbean influences as well as Brazilian ones. His pivotal 1970 album, “A Bad Donato,” was a radical turn toward funk, merging Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. The keyboardist and arranger Eumir Deodato, who worked with Mr. Donato on that album, went on to have a worldwide Brazilian funk hit with his version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).”Mr. Donato’s album “A Bad Donato,” released in 1970, merged Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. Mr. Donato returned to Brazil in 1973. There, a friend persuaded him to record songs with lyrics rather than solely instrumentals, including his own modest but earnest vocals. His tuneful, easygoing 1973 album, “Quem É Quem,” was not an immediate hit, but it has been widely praised over the years; in 2007, Brazilian Rolling Stone placed it among the 100 greatest Brazilian albums.Mr. Donato’s new lyricists included two of the leading figures in the determinedly eclectic Brazilian cultural movement known as tropicália: Caetano Veloso, who put Portuguese lyrics to “O Sapo” (“The Frog”) to turn it into “A Rã,” and Gilberto Gil, who supplied lyrics for many of the songs on Mr. Donato’s 1975 album, “Lugar Comum.” Mr. Donato also wrote songs with lyrics by his younger brother, Lysias Ênio Oliveira.For the next two decades, Mr. Donato recorded almost entirely as a sideman. The singer Gal Costa recorded “A Rã” for her 1974 album, “Cantar,” and hired Mr. Donato as an arranger and bandleader for that album and her subsequent tour.Mr. Donato also recorded extensively with important Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Chico Buarque and Martinho da Vila. He continued to perform his own music and released a live album, “Leilíadas,” in 1986. But he didn’t return to making his own studio albums until “Coisas Tao Simples” (“Such Simple Things”), released in 1994, even as he continued to do session work with songwriters including Bebel Gilberto and Marisa Monte.The albums Mr. Donato made after resuming his solo career were unpredictable and diverse. Some returned to his bossa nova-jazz fusions; some featured singers, including Wanda Sá, Paula Morelenbaum, Maria Tita and Joyce. Others had titles reflecting Mr. Donato’s fondness for musical hybrids, like “Bluchanga” (2017) and “Sambolero” (2010), which won a Latin Grammy Award for best Latin jazz album. He also received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2010.In 2017, Mr. Donato made an album of synthesizer-centered funk, “Sintetizamor,” with his son, João Donato, known professionally as Donatinho, who survives him. Other survivors include his wife, Ivone Belém, and his daughters, Jodel and Joana Donato. He lived in Rio de Janeiro.In 2021, Mr. Donato collaborated with Jazz Is Dead, the Los Angeles-based project of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, on the album “Jazz Is Dead 7.” In 2022 he released “Serotonina,” an easygoing pop-jazz album featuring his electric piano and clavinet.On Twitter, Mr. Veloso summed up Mr. Donato’s music admiringly. It was, he wrote, “the highest achievement of extreme complexity in extreme simplicity.”Ana Ionova More

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      Astrud Gilberto, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ Singer, Dies at 83

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      It was the first song she ever recorded. And it played a key role in making the Brazilian sound known as bossa nova a phenomenon in the United States.Astrud Gilberto, whose soft and sexy vocal performance on “The Girl From Ipanema,” the first song she ever recorded, helped make the sway of Brazilian bossa nova a hit sound in the United States in the 1960s, died on Monday. She was 83.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Astrud Gilberto: 6 Essential Songs

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      The Brazilian singer radiated quiet poise and subtle undercurrents.Astrud Gilberto, who died on Monday at 83, brought the first, alluring taste of Brazilian bossa nova to countless listeners worldwide. Her collaborations — with Stan Getz, Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine and others — also helped cement the connections of bossa nova and jazz.Her voice was disarmingly modest, sometimes hitting notes a little flat and often barely above a whisper; the effect was intimate and seemingly weightless. When she sang in English, her Brazilian accent gave her an endearing hint of awkwardness and approachability, even as her phrasing stayed supple, while the translated lyrics invited a wider audience to hear great Brazilian songwriters like Antonio Carlos Jobim. Her early recordings are her most radiant ones, steeped in the pensive, nostalgic longing that Brazilians call saudade.Here are six indelible Astrud Gilberto performances.Stan Getz featuring Astrud Gilberto: “The Girl From Ipanema” (1963)This was the bossa nova that seduced the world: a purposeful crossover collaboration by the American saxophonist Stan Getz, Jobim, Astrud Gilberto and her then-husband, the definitive bossa nova guitarist and singer João Gilberto. Its full version opened with João Gilberto singing the Portuguese lyrics, but the world-conquering single cuts quickly to Astrud Gilberto’s breathy voice in English, with Jobim on piano trickling just a few perfect notes to answer her.The New Stan Getz Quartet featuring Astrud Gilberto: “It Might as Well Be Spring” (1964)Gilberto doesn’t exactly sound “as jumpy as a puppet on a string” in this live performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard with the Stan Getz Quartet. Instead, she’s poised and sure-footed, musing about the possibility of romance as Getz’s saxophone scurries and spirals around her.“Água de Beber” (1965)Jobim rejoined Gilberto as a collaborator on her luminous solo debut, “The Astrud Gilberto Album.” His voice shadows hers on their nonchalantly elegant version of his bossa nova standard “Água de Beber” (“Water to Drink”); as she sings about a love as essential as water, the song glows with mutual fondness.“The Shadow of Your Smile” (1965)A studio orchestra offers a hint of fanfare, then falls into an admiring hush behind Gilberto’s voice in this Oscar- and Grammy-winning song from the movie “The Sandpiper.” Written by Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster, with strong bossa nova influences, the song’s arrangement ripples around Gilberto with little instrumental flourishes — strings, flutes, piano, vibraphone — but Gilberto’s voice maintains its serene wistfulness.“Berimbau” (1966)A berimbau, the one-stringed percussion instrument prized in Bahia, Brazil, twangs its way through this song by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes. The brassy, slightly ominous arrangement by Gil Evans highlights the pinpoint syncopations of Gilberto’s vocal.“Maria Quiet” (1966)Gilberto sang most often about love as it arrives and disappears. But every so often she turned to other thoughts — like the feminist resentment in “Maria Quiet,” a brisk samba with lyrics (de Moraes translated by Norman Gimbel) about women’s endless work. Gilberto’s delivery is pointed, and quietly seething. More

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      Rita Lee, Brazil’s Queen of Rock, Is Dead at 75

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      As a member the 1960s band Os Mutantes and later as a solo artist, she drew a following that included Kurt Cobain, Beck and the Prince of Wales.Rita Lee, a convention-flouting titan of Brazilian music who emerged with the seminal experimental band Os Mutantes and went on to become a solo star known widely as her country’s Queen of Rock, died on Monday at her home in São Paulo. She was 75.Her death was announced in a statement posted on her Instagram account. She had been receiving treatments for lung cancer, which she learned she had in 2021.With Os Mutantes, Ms. Lee was a product of the tropicália movement (also known as tropicalismo), an anti-authoritarian Brazilian cultural flowering that started in the late 1960s. She ultimately became a commercial powerhouse, selling a reported 55 million records over a career that stretched over half a century.As a solo artist, she churned out a string of hits in the 1970s, among then “Ovelha Negra” (“Black Sheep”) and “Mania de Você” (“Mania For You”), that became enduring classics. She was accompanied by the band Tutti Frutti in her early years, and later, by her husband, Roberto de Carvalho.In 2001, Ms. Lee took home a Latin Grammy Award for best Portuguese-language rock or alternative album for “3001.”Her reach was global. Kurt Cobain, David Byrne and Beck are among the many musical innovators who hailed the subversive oeuvre of Os Mutantes. In 1988, King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, requested one of her records for a dance at a banquet at the British Embassy in Paris. He was said to know the words “by heart,” according to The Daily Mirror.But she was no pop confection. After a troubled and rebellious youth, she was arrested in 1976 for marijuana possession and held up as a cautionary tale by Brazil’s military dictatorship. She also made multiple trips to treatment facilities for drug and alcohol use.In 2001, Ms. Lee’s “3001” won a Latin Grammy Award for best Portuguese-language rock or alternative album.Amanda Perobelli/ReutersIrreverent and candid, Ms. Lee carried herself with rock-star swagger. (After her cancer diagnosis, the mordant Ms. Lee nicknamed her tumor Jair, a jab at Brazil’s incendiary president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro.)As one of the few female rockers to play guitar onstage in the 1960s, and as a solo artist who explored sexuality from a woman’s point of view, Ms. Lee was hailed as a feminist hero. When informed of Ms. Lee’s death during a Senate commission hearing, Brazil’s cultural minister, the singer Margareth Menezes, was visibly overcome with emotion, describing Ms. Lee as a “revolutionary woman.”Ms. Lee herself was a little more blunt about her triumphs.“When we talk about feminism and all these things, I don’t really have the theory of it, I’m more of the action,” Ms. Lee said in a 2017 television interview. “They used to say that women couldn’t wear long pants. Huh? Yes, we can, I wore mine. They used to say that women couldn’t play rock. I would get my ovaries, my uterus, I’d play my rock ’n’ roll.”Rita Lee Jones was born on Dec. 31, 1947, in São Paulo, the youngest of three daughters of Charles Jones, an American-born dentist descended from Confederates who fled to Brazil after the Civil War (Rita’s middle name was inspired by Gen. Robert E. Lee), and Romilda Padula, a pianist.When she was a child, Ms. Lee recounted in “Rita Lee: Uma Autobiografia” (2016), a sewing machine repairman sexually abused her in her home, a traumatic experience that fueled her rebellious spirt. .Musically inclined, she played in several groups as a teenager and, despite her early stage fright, formed Os Mutantes (the Mutants) with the brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista in 1966. In an early interview, she claimed that the band, whose name was inspired by a science fiction book called “O Planeta dos Mutantes” (“The Planet of the Mutants”), had “come from another planet to take over the world.”The band was to São Paulo “what the Grateful Dead were to San Francisco, the Velvet Underground to New York or Nirvana to Seattle,” Larry Rohter of The New York Times wrote during a comeback tour in 2007.Ms. Lee performing in São Paulo in 2012. Her songs often served as a pointed rebuke to Brazil’s authoritarian climate.Marcos Mazini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn terms of psychedelic trappings and extravagant plumage, the band was far more Dead than Velvets, although it took the free-for-all spirit of the ’60s to absurdist levels, mixing American and British psychedelia with Brazilian genres like bossa nova, and adding electronic experimentalism and a prankster sensibility that served as a pointed rebuke to Brazil’s authoritarian climate.Os Mutantes made their mark backing Gilberto Gil at the Festival of Brazilian Popular Music in 1967. The next year the band appeared on the groundbreaking compilation album “Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circenses,” featuring songs by Mr. Gil, Caetano Veloso and other leading lights of the movement.The band’s debut album, released that same year, was sprinkled with environmental sounds, jagged guitar riffs. and other sonic detritus. It was, Rolling Stone wrote when including it in a 2013 roundup of the greatest stoner albums of all time, one of the late 1960s’ “most mischievous head trips, which is saying something.”Ms. Lee left the band to pursue a solo career after it released its fifth album, “E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets” (“Mutants and their Comets in the Country of Weed”), in 1972. She retreated from the limelight after her final studio effort, “Reza” (“Prayer”), in 2012, although she did release a new song, “Change,” with her husband and the producer Gui Boratto in 2021.She is survived by her husband; her sons, Beto, João and Antônio; and two grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Arnaldo Baptista of Os Mutantes, ended in divorce in 1972.A vegan and animal rights activist, the onetime countercultural firebrand spent much of her final years “confined to my den, in a little house in the middle of the woods surrounded by animals and plants,” only going out shopping or to the dentist, she wrote in a 2020 essay for the Brazilian magazine Veja.“Today,” she added, “I do everything over the internet and pray I don’t break a tooth.” More

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      36 Hours in Rio de Janeiro: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Lunch, then more samba
      There are two excellent lunch options on Rua do Senado, both from the same owner, that offer very different experiences. On the high end is Lilia, a suave two-floor lunch spot with a changing prix-fixe menu that is eclectic and focused on fresh ingredients (lunch for two, about 300 reais). If you prefer snacks at streetside tables, head a few doors down to Labuta Bar for torresmo (fried pork belly), croquettes, oysters and sandwiches, washed down with house-made iced mate or a cold beer (lunch for two, about 90 reais). A few steps away, catch live samba at one of the city’s oldest bars, Armazém Senado, founded in 1907. The business, which was once a market, still has its high shelves stocked with toilet paper and bleach — along with plenty of bottles of cachaça. More