The Existential Adventures of Iconoclastic Brazilian Musician Tim Maia: A Short Animated Film

Late last year, Lua­ka Bop Records released Nobody Can Live For­ev­er: The Exis­ten­tial Soul of Tim Maia, a ret­ro­spec­tive album that includes 15 tracks record­ed by Tim Maia, the great­est Brazil­ian singer of all time, accord­ing to Rolling Stone. Maia “was the Big Bang who com­plete­ly changed the scene when he arrived [in Brazil] at the turn of the ’70s,” Nel­son Mot­ta told The New York Times last fall. “He took the black Amer­i­can thing and mixed it with Brazil­ian forms like sam­ba, baião and xax­a­do, inau­gu­rat­ing a new direc­tion in Brazil­ian pop that remains pop­u­lar even today: that of urban black music.” As this short ani­mat­ed film makes clear, Maia also had an out­sized per­son­al­i­ty and appetites that brought about his ear­ly demise, but not with­out first mak­ing him a leg­end. Below we have rare footage of Tim Maia per­form­ing live in 1971: