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“The hips of tradition”
Tom Zé knows many things...
He knows how to start: a hypnotic ferocity in media res...
He knows the art of farewell: a whisper of melody and a few well-chosen words...
He knows the importance of interludes: brief, incisive, rejuvenating...
He knows how to dive into the ancestral, wrapping you in sweetness...
He knows melancholy and he knows the smile...
“The hips of tradition”
A clamorous album....
....
My god, Tom, you are fifty-six years old, the age when musicians, even if they have experimented, tend to calm down.
You, on the other hand, are finally settled. No more anxieties, no more stomachaches...
Sure, it’s true: you were the great outcast, the one “entered the coffin even before he died,” but in the end the stroke of luck arrived. Clamorous. Unexpected...
David Byrne who happened to listen to “Estudando o samba” by chance, well, there you have it, he went crazy over that album...and not just that one, also “Todos os olhos,” the one with the butt hole on the cover, and “Nave Maria,” the one made with instruments invented by you.
And even if the Philistines tried to stop him, “but come on Mr. Byrne, Brazil is full of wonderful musicians, why Tom Zé, why that madman?” in the end, he released an anthology of fifteen songs: “The best of Tom Ze, brazil classics number 4, Luaka Bop.” A masterpiece that says hello...
And so, relax Tom, you are the Brazilian musician of the moment. More than that, you’re in the pantheon, with Joao, with Vinicius. History, as your mentor says, “is a sleeping beauty that sometimes awakens.”
And then, as always, your mentor sent you 20,000 dollars for the expenses of the next album. You just need to pick it up at the exchange office and then bring it to Banco do Brazil...
Only that...
Only that leaving the exchange office in São Paulo means being at the mercy of robbers, or at least that's your paranoia and, let's face it, it might be life’s bitch, it might be whatever it is, you are a bit paranoid...
“And if they rob me with this poor man's face I have, they will think that I made the money disappear”...
And anyway, I understand you, those who have been targeted by bad luck, when things go well, can only worry.
The only thing to do is to carry out the operation under escort. So, while you embark on the endeavor, there’s Jarbas twenty steps away and Lauro on the other side of the street. Your wife and her mother are sitting in a bar in front of the exchange office. You enter and after a while, you exit with the stash.
You’ve studied the route to the bank down to the tiniest details. So, you set off while your four companions follow you, attentive like cats...
At a certain point, a guy starts running directly towards you, Lauro wants to warn you but doesn't make it in time. You hear his footsteps behind you and your breath falters. And, as he is practically half a meter from you, you think: “everything will go wrong, as always”...
“Oh no, meu filho, this time you’re wrong.” The guy passes you and gestures with one arm to the bus that is leaving.
You then breathe a sigh of relief, enter the bank, and deposit that damned money.
...
“The best of Tom Ze, brazil classics number 4, was one of my first reviews here on debaser, and it’s an album that has kept me company for years. At the time (1990) it was an absolute blow.
It's difficult indeed to find such mastery in moving between harmony and dissonance, between playful avant-garde and popular soul...
You can find examples of concrete poetry, highly capish and conceptual moments, but everything is played down, in the sense that besides intelligence, there is a smile. No less, it seems that the luminaries of contemporary music, thinking of “Toc,” an instrumental taken from “Estudando o samba,” cannot sleep at night. One of them even says that “it offers a new concept of time that I define as four-dimensional.” Wow...
Then you'll find exquisite noise-making and polyrhythms + a handful of pop songs of those that stick to you and you can’t shake off...
And the wisdom/madness of one who knows the essentials, for example, if you invent love, I invent solitude, if you invent another life, I invent resignation. And if you didn’t understand, to enlighten you, I blind you, to explain to you, I confuse you, to confuse you, I explain to you, and so on...
In short, a lot of stuff...
So much stuff, Tom, that even if the album you’re about to make was chewed-up rubbish, it would be nothing...
You’re fifty-six, you can relax.....
...
But, surprise of surprises, “The hips of tradition” is just as beautiful...
It's that Tom Zé is a wild man, Tom Zé is as old as the hills.
Born in thirty-six, in the hyper-poetic village of Irará, upon the arrival of electric light, he loses his breath. Nothing is as it was before, the other world, time, space.
But, in “Ogodô,” the joyous modernist candomblé opening the album, he sings “excited science will make the sign of the cross, and we will light bonfires to appreciate the electric light bulb.” Past and future in Tom Zé’s music are always in eternal tension. He is the avant-garde retarder, who, though experimenting with new things, never forgets the stories heard in his father’s shop, the earthy music of his northeast, the processions, the fairs, the medicine men.
...
Tom Zé is a whole lot of other things.
He is a musical being, one who sways in melody and moves disjointedly in rhythm.
He is a sound hunter who knows the enchantment of the found object, the wonder of the noise box.
He is an inventor, an assembler of sound machines worthy of Professor Balthazar. A apple falls on someone’s head, to another, his wife hands over a polisher to repair.
He is a sage, an egghead.
In “The hips of tradition,” he quotes: Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Guimaraes Rosa, Virgil, Arthur Clarke, Haroldo Do Campos, Cantor’s mathematics, Stanislaw Lem's linguistic theses, children's literature and surely I am forgetting someone or something.
Then he dedicates the album to Jackson Do Pandeiro, the northeastern musician, popular soul of the country...
And it is precisely the popular soul that shines as never before: hints of ancient and almost sacred, ballads that know the path of the senses and the heart.
There is also all the rest, of course: the taste of the unexpected, the serpentine step, the dowsing intelligence. But how not to expect it from someone like him?
The fact is, like all Brazilians, Tom Zé knows how to write simple songs...
Those that, and here I steal his words, resonate in the air with no doorway, ties, knots...
He, for his part, adds a kind of rough grace, the truthfulness, and poetry of that northeast, always his guiding star...
An album of clamorous beauty...
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