Airto Guimorvan Moreira was born August 5, 1941, in Itaiópolis, Brazil, and raised in Curitiba, where by age six he was already winning contests for percussion and singing, hosting his own radio show before his teens, and playing professionally by thirteen. He moved to São Paulo at sixteen, then to Rio de Janeiro in 1965, where he met vocalist Flora Purim, then singing in a Rio jazz club; Purim's own career is covered in full in her JazzProfiles.com profile. She moved to the US in 1967, and Airto followed shortly after.

Through bassist Walter Booker, Moreira began playing with Joe Zawinul, who introduced him to Miles Davis. Davis recruited him for the landmark Bitches Brew sessions in 1969 and the tours that followed, putting him at the center of jazz-rock fusion's founding document. He joined Weather Report in 1971, then a year later joined Chick Corea's new band, Return to Forever, playing drums on the group's first two albums, Return to Forever and Light as a Feather, alongside Purim, Stanley Clarke, and Joe Farrell.

Moreira is credited as one of the principal forces behind the infusion of Latin percussive textures into jazz, and one of the progenitors of what would later be called world music.

Moreira's percussion work, drawing on Brazilian folkloric rhythms applied to a jazz-rock and fusion context, opened an entirely new textural vocabulary for jazz drummers and percussionists, influence traceable through decades of Latin jazz and world-music-inflected crossover work.