Chance Meeting
Friday October 11th, 2024 with Heavy Ben
Tom Zé

Chance meeting on a samba study of protest and experimentation Feliz Aniversario #88 Tom Zé A chance meeting in a record shop in 1989 Rio de Janeiro led to this radio show. David Byrne was scouring the record stores of downtown Rio in search of material for a compilation of samba recordings for his recently founded label Luaka Bop. He happened upon Tom Zé’s “Estudando o Samba” (Studying the samba), which had been misplaced in a bin of samba records, no doubt thanks to the title. Back in New York, Byrne found something quite different - an edgy, vanguardist take on samba that seemed to have more in common with New York’s downtown music scene than with the modern samba of Rio’s north side. It had been recorded in 1975, around the time that Byrne formed Talking Heads. When Byrne came across “Estudando o Samba”, Tom Zé was at the nadir of his career. Most of his records were out of print and he was surviving on local gigs for small audiences of university students, intellectuals, and fellow experimental musicians in São Paulo. At the time, he was contemplating a move back to Irará to work at a service station owned by one of his cousins. Within two years he was contracted as the first artist on the Luaka Bop label. In 1990, when Luaka Bop issued “The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits”, Zé was not an obvious candidate for rehabilitation in Brazil. Santo de casa não faz milagre—“the house saint doesn’t perform miracles,” as the expression goes. In the US and Europe, however, Tom Zé’s sudden appearance seemed like a small miracle in the way it defied all expectations of what Brazilian music should sound like. Critics attempted comparisons with Captain Beefheart and John Zorn, but they were never very convincing. He had emerged from another culture, one equally modern and urban, yet with different musical sensibilities. Besides introducing Tom Zé to an international audience and reviving his career in Brazil, “Massive Hits” also led Zé to a creative renaissance in the studio and on stage. As a pop artist, he is something of an anomaly, having produced some of his best work after turning fifty-five. In his eighties, he is at the top of his game and playing with the best band he has ever had. Tom Zé grew up between two distinct, yet interconnected worlds: one that was “traditional” or “pre-Gutenbergian”, reliant on oral communication, and mostly poor, and another that was “modern” and distinguished by literacy, access to new technologies, and the promise of upward mobility. Much of his artistic production over the past seven decades is informed by the tension between these two realities. In the 1960s, Zé began composing music for the local branch of the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura), the cultural arm of the left-wing National Students’ Union, which was closely associated with the Brazilian Communist Party. The CPC was charged with raising political consciousness among urban workers and rural peasants with the aim of building an anti-imperialist and socialist revolutionary movement. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and emboldened by the leftward tack of Brazil’s populist president, João Goulart, left-wing artists and intellectuals joined forces with union leaders and peasant leagues with hopes of transforming Brazil. While working with the CPC and circulating within the broader university scene, Zé came into contact with other young artists, like musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and poets José Carlos Capinan and Torquato Neto. In 1964, he first performed with Gil and Veloso, along with Veloso’s younger sister Maria Bethânia and Gal Costa in a musical showcase called “Nós, por exemplo” (Us, for example). In that same year, a US-backed military coup ousted Goulart, quashed the labor movements, persecuted students, and abolished the CPC. The impact of the military regime in Brazil, especially in the latter half of the 1960s, was that of a dictatorship that sought to control every aspect of public life, including the arts and culture. Musicians and composers who were active during this time all speak of how their work was shaped to avoid being sent to prison because of the curtailment of civil rights and the arrest of intellectuals and artists across all fields of culture, and the clandestine nature of recording, which the authorities sought to curtail, or at the very least limit. Human creativity does not cease because of the whims of authoritarianism, however, and ironically this repression resulted in a highly creative period in Brazilian culture, with the rise of Tropicala, Bossa Nova, jazz, Cinema Novo, and literature of subtle protest through allusion and double entendre. Veloso, Gil, and Costa were the most visible faces of the tropicalist movement, but Zé brought to the group an interest in formal experimentation honed during his years studying composition at the university in Salvador, and an acute sense of social and political satire. His song, “Parque Industrial,” which appeared on the collective concept album "Tropicália, ou Panis et Circensis", lampooned the official discourse of industrial development, the promises of consumer capitalism, and the rise of the sensationalist press. For decades, Zé was all but written out of the history of the tropicalia movement, which focused on Veloso, Gil, and Costa, who would become superstars in the following decade. This has changed in recent years with new scholarship on the movement and several excellent documentaries about Tom Zé, such as Decio Matos’s Fabricando Tom Zé (2006) and Ígor Iglesias’s Tom Zé: Astronauta Libertado (2009). Still today, there is debate around Tom Zé’s place in tropicália, with some arguing that his musical project was distinct, having diverged so radically from mainstream MPB (Música popular brasileira). Others regard Zé as the musician who most faithfully carried on in the vanguardist spirit of the movement in the ensuing years. It’s a question of emphasis: Was tropicália ultimately about opening up Brazilian popular music to the electric guitar and various forms of international pop? Or was it about permanent experimentation informed by the musical avantgarde? Or was it more complicated? Tom Zé recorded his share of radio-friendly pop songs, like the now-forgotten “Jeitinho dela” (1970), while Veloso recorded Araça Azul (1972), perhaps the most explicitly vanguardist album in the history of Brazilian popular music. These lingering questions are a testament to the ambiguity of tropicália, which was based on the dual imperatives of formal experimentation and pop viability. https://www.luakabop.com/artists/tom-ze https://www.jazzwise.com/review/tom-ze-todos-os-olhos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Z%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic%C3%A1lia:_ou_Panis_et_Circencis (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")