Tom Zé
The best of

Fabulous encounter between tradition and modernity, between playfulness and melancholy, between dissonance and light, by someone who "stood in the storm and slept in a hurricane."

But let's proceed in order and start from "Tropicalia," or rather from Joao.

I could listen to someone like Joao for hours, but that's not the point. He was just a zen singer and didn't make instrumental pieces for guitar, brass section, typewriter, and blender.

However, I've heard that a madman armed with an oscillometer, little bells, and other devilish devices is going around saying that his (Joao's) is the most perfect voice of the twentieth century. And I agree, of course, even if I've come to that conclusion empirically. But maybe this story of the music-loving scientist is a hoax.

And, anyway, I position myself philosophically equidistantly between zen and the blender. Also because I need both.

And, anyway two, we are in Brazil here, gentlemen, land of magic and heart of musical aesthetics. On one side zen and measure, the admirable essentiality (Joao). On the other, experimentation and the most ingenious pop madness (Tom).

But if I mentioned Joao, I did it only to clarify that Tom Zé (the guy with the instrumental pieces for guitar, brass section, typewriter, and blender) is only relatively connected to my love for Brazilian music.

Tom Zé is atypical. And atypical is a term I've adored since childhood, as they called all the soccer players I liked that way when I was a kid.

However, all the Brazilian music I love, including his, is fine and popular. And it's based on rhythm, which Tom Zé states in the liner notes, in Brazil is an aspect of the sacred. That "Rhythm is dehydrated God."

Yes, Brazilian music is based on rhythm... and light, melancholy. All qualities also present in Tom Zé. That's why Joao. That's why Tropicalia.

But who is Tom Zé? I don't quite know. Since, practically, I only know this best of. What can I say, I'm part of the ancient race of ruminant listeners, meaning those who listen to one album at a time, nibbled, savored for a long time, with slow digestion. Maybe listening to the track x twenty-five times before moving on to track y.

Anyway, we owe our knowledge of Tom Zé, as if we didn't already owe enough to him, to David Byrne.

It was he who discovered him and brought him out of oblivion, producing this album. In the early nineties, our Tom, after twenty years of music, was about to open a gas station. The only one of the tropicalists (Veloso, Gal Costa, Gil, and others) not to have succeeded.

Tom Zé is a futurist connected to tradition, a devoted passionate of the music of his northeast, and someone capable of extracting notes from any imaginable or imaginable devilry, for example, from tools and appliances assembled in the most extravagant ways.

In the album booklet, there's a diagram of one of his creatures: a chest of drawers containing blenders, vacuum cleaners, and other applications (?) that are activated by pressing a button on a keyboard of little bells (?).

Imagine how such an instrument could sound, add a thousand percussive solutions (the dehydrated god), dust with proto-wave dissonances and girly choruses. And think, as already said, of a sort of continuum with the essence of Brazilian music, which is light, melancholy, and whatever else.

And above all, add sharp, dry, sharp irony and the brilliance of formidable texts full of intelligence, simplicity, linguistic insights, onomatopoeias, and various follies, or everything that the "Luaka Bop" press release called "eccentric metaphorical lyricism." If you don't understand Portuguese, don't worry. The booklet includes English translations by Arto Lindsay.

But let's start with the most beautiful song of all time (??????).

It's called "Ui! (Voce Inventa)." It alternates a circular and hypnotic rhythm, slightly dissonant, with a samba almost like a nursery rhyme, where an elf-like voice and silly girly choruses sing this little thing: "You invent the law, and I invent obedience/you invent God, and I invent faith/you invent work, and I invent the hand/you invent weight, and I invent the back/you invent another life, and I invent resignation/ you invent sin, and I invent hell/ you invent love, and I invent loneliness."

Something that, in my opinion, they play at the gates of paradise in the moment when everything becomes clear. Provided you have a humorous god, of course. Here, no importance is given, and essential things are said. Here, there is no "complexo de epico" of the eponymous song (it's track 12).

All Brazilian composers, says our Tom, are complexed due to the insane obsession with serious conversation. And they smile seriously, cry seriously, play seriously.

"Oh, my God in paradise, how can one be so serious in hell? And why this desire to seem like a hero or a university professor? Maybe because the snake that started eating itself from the tail is both hunter and prey?"

Even "To" has a philosophical jingle rhythm and is hyper-rhythmic, hyper-nursery rhyme-like, and still with an elf voice that starts cunningly and reaches the edge of a scream. And it says, "I tell you clearly to confuse you, I confuse you to tell you clearly." And this too is for the gates of paradise. Especially because it's fun.

The album is divided between these slightly crazy sambas, more intense, nervous, and noisy moments (the ones unconsciously proto-wave) and very short pieces caught in dadaist experimentalism.

Then there are also songs by "almost" classical Brazilian songwriters, with even a Jobim/De Moraes cover, barely disturbed by a lazy percussive noise.

God bless Jobim and De Moraes. And Joao. And tropicalia.

But let's hear from Tom Ze in an old article I found online: "Producers thought I was completely crazy, but it was really me, someone who from the beginning didn't feel like a songwriter but wanted to make art of their own musical deficiencies. Unable to adapt to the mainstream, to align with samba or bossa nova, I grew up hoping the world would change and get used to my sounds. And in waiting, I ended up in the grave before getting old."

What do you think of that phrase about making art of one's own musical deficiencies? And about that desire not to align? Not aligning doesn't mean not being within a tradition and a history; otherwise, there wouldn't be the Jobim/De Moraes cover. And there wouldn't be "Solidao," which is also a child of that tradition. Nor a song like "Vai," which you might even hear from Caetano, but without that frenetic singing and those reckless linguistic acrobatics.

In short, there is a continuum with the best Brazilian music, but also, and above all, a genuine search for style, where fabulous ideas (like bringing the guitar from the harmonic world to the rhythmic one or creating new sound experiences by building new musical machines) generate a new and very personal language. Unique, even. You won't find another like Tom Zé.

But how many masterpieces in this album!!!

"Riso e o faca" is a depressed music box counterpointed by a spinning top sound with a Baudelaire-like text sifted through the avant-garde.

"Um oh e um ah" are fifty-two seconds of crazy TV variety, a "tuca tuca" from another planet. The text only repeats O and A and the word paracatuzum.

Paracatuzum...

"Ma" and "Nave Maria," which open and close the album, are instead superb contaminations between tribalism, noise, avant-garde.

The poetry in "Ma" is extremely high; "Eh, the samba and the archangels/oh, the road and the guerrilla/eh, the hand of dawn/ oh, moonlight of the moon/eh, the breast and your thirst/...

The choruses in "Nave Maria" "Dudu, bidu, bidu, mama agua/dudu bidu bidu papa, da, da" are almost too much.

These are fabulous songs, speaking of primary things, birth, baptism, life in its essence. And they manage to do so with a frightfully expressive economy: synthesis, madness...madness, synthesis...or perhaps comedy...or perhaps tragedy...more likely the union of the two.

I insist, at the gates of paradise there is this stuff and then maybe Bach crossed the threshold.

Leaving aside discussing the other songs, all beautiful, I would like to give you some advice. Recently I found online a conversation between Tom Zé, Arto Lindsay, and David Byrne. Well, read it, it's worth it. Especially when he talks about his beloved northeast.

I'll add that while writing this review I also listened to the subsequent album, the first studio album after many years. Needless to say, it's a masterpiece.

Stop.

Or rather, paracatuzum.