Rita Lee. Photo by Marco Senche via Flickr.
Rita Lee, the Brazilian singer who started her career as a founding member of the long-running, highly original rock band Os Mutantes, has passed away. The news was shared on Lee’s official Instagram page Monday morning (May 9) and first reported in English by ABC News shortly thereafter. No cause of death was given. She was 75 years old.
“We announce the death of Rita Lee, at her residence in São Paulo late last night, surrounded by all the love of her family, as she always wanted,” the post reads, roughly translated from its original Portuguese. “The wake will be open to the public, at the Planetarium in Ibirapuera Park, on Wednesday May 10th, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. In accordance with Rita’s wishes, her body will be cremated. The ceremony will be private. In this moment of deep sadness, the family appreciates everyone’s affection and love.”
Lee started Os Mutantes in 1966 with the brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista. Their self-titled debut LP, released in 1968, was a foundational text of tropicalía, a short-lived, bright-burning artistic and cultural movement that took hold in Brazil in the late ’60s. It lost steam in the early ’70s but remains hugely influential on popular music, both in its home country and abroad.
Of tropicalia’s leaders — Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, and the recently deceased legend Gal Costa among them — Os Mutantes were the most obvious outlier, injecting a distinctively weird sense of humor into their scrappy art-rock experiments from the beginning. These vibes were emphasized early on by the group’s semi-official fourth member (and the third Baptista brother), Cláudio César Dias Baptista, who built esoteric auxiliary instruments and contributed quirky sound effects. With his help, they were also one of the earliest Brazilian groups to go electric.
Though Sergio Dias leads a reassembled and expanded version of Os Mutantes to this day, Lee left the band in 1971 during a period of intense depression and self-imposed seclusion. She’d already released her first solo album a year prior, though, and she soon bounced back, collaborating with a variety of groups and solo acts throughout the ’70s. She joined the collective Tutti Frutti for a four-year, four-album run starting in 1974, thought this streak was punctuated in 1976 by a period during which she was simultaneously pregnant for the first time and on house arrest for marijuana possession.
She put out her third, self-titled studio LP in 1979 and would go on to release close to 20 more albums over the next three decades. She shared her final record, Reza, in 2012 and announced her retirement from touring the same year. In 2021, she collaborated with Roberto de Carvalho — her husband and musical partner of 44 years — on a song called “Change.” De Carvalho survives her, as do their three children: Beto, Joao, and Tui.