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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), were other successes.
In 1951, Sumac became the first Latin American and Peruvian female singer to debut on Broadway. In "Chuncho (The Forest Creatures)" (1953), she developed her own technical singing, named "double voice" or "triple coloratura". During the same period, she performed in Carnegie Hall 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. According to Variety in 1974, Sumac had more than 3,000 concerts "covering the entire globe", breaking any previous records by a performer. Fashion magazine V listed her as one of the 9 international fashion icons of all time in 2010. She sold over 40 million records, making her the best-selling Peruvian singer in history.
She was discovered by Les Baxter 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. Yma Sumac, August 8, 1950. Malibu, Hollywood Bowl, Recording Studio, Residence (90 photos by Peter Stackpole) for Life magazine
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 Elizabeth II. 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 theater 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). 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, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin by Tobias Rupprecht, Cambridge University Press, 2015, , p. 88 and afterward throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. Their performance in Bucharest, was recorded as the album Recital, her only live in concert record. Sumac spent the rest of the 1960s performing sporadically.
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."
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). With the resurgence of lounge music in the late 1990s, Sumac's profile rose again when the song "Ataypura" was featured in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski.
Her song "Bo Mambo" appeared in a commercial for Kahlúa liquor and was sampled for the song "Hands Up" by The Black Eyed Peas. The song "Gopher Mambo" was used in the films Ordinary Decent Criminal, Happy Texas, Spy Games, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, among others. "Gopher Mambo" was used in an act of the Cirque Du Soleil show Quidam, as a musical motif in the Russian show Kukhnya (along with "Bo Mambo" and "Taki Rari"), and in an iPhone commercial in 2020. The songs "Goomba Boomba" and "Malambo No. 1" appeared in Death 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" by Vanessa Paradis, and her album Mambo! is the record that Belinda Carlisle pulls out of its jacket in the video for "Mad About You". "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. "Yma Sumac Receives Highest Peruvian Honor", Sunvirgin.com; accessed October 14, 2015.
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.
For years, rumors circulated that Sumac was a housewife from Brooklyn whose real name was "Amy Camus", which she reversed to become Yma Sumac. The origin of the rumor may plausibly be traced to a cleverly formulated review by influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who used a literary device, in a December 1950 column, to suggest that Sumac's voice was in fact a theremin, that Xtabay—or Axterbay—was Pig Latin for Les Baxter, and that the name of the singer was Amy Camus, who took Serutan (a contemporary laxative: "natures" spelled backwards).
| performs "Taita Inty", "Tumpa!", "Ataypura!" |
| performs "Lament" |
| performs "Chuncho" |
| performs "Taita Inty" |
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