Tom Ze - Estudando O Samba

Year:1976
Style:Brazil
Country:Tropicalia
Quality:128K
Size:34.6 MB

Tom Zé is a Brazilian from the poor Northeast. Living in the big city of Sao Paulo. On a recent visit to chez Zé, David Byrne heard him talk about the metropolis with the eyes and ears of a poet. Both inside and outside at the same time. Tom Zé's is music which gives us hope. Music that finds beauty in strange places. Music of "street and street riot".
Zé's unique creativity as a modern troubadour is a fascinating outgrowth of formal musical education with a concentration in classical cello. He began his musical life with songs of prosaic streetlife and pastoral paeans to his tiny home town, Irara. Later, he became known as one of the most ironic Brazilian Tropicalistas with songs of satire and politics, songs loaded with dense metaphorical content. By the mid '70s, he took the experimental route by creating music with blenders, floor polishers, radios, typewriters and "prepared" acoustic guitars.
Tom Zé's incongruous development is akin to the fits and starts, the extreme contrasts engendered by the rapid change and modern ferment in struggling countries like Brazil. People who never before had electricity are suddenly getting TV. Zé describes the paradox: "...we loved our cultural heritage, but we became illiterate. The solution was to speak culture, talk culture, dance culture. We began to read metaphysical concepts into daily events... to superimpose on a harsh landscape visual keys to esoteric knowledge, establish philosophical axes in the syntax of a textile language... We Northeasterns have one foot in poverty and another in cultural riches". Strange things have happened to Tom Zé since we last saw (and heard) him — namely, he has built a career in the United States and Europe, places most distant from his native Irara, Northeastern Brazil.
It is an event so immersed in unexpected irony that Tom Zé can't avoid a chuckle while commenting on it. "I have never planned to build a career outside of Brazil", he says. "You see, I was virtually banished from Brazilian music. I have been practically in exile since 1973, when a record called 'Todos os Olhos' (All the Eyes) threw me out of the loop, out of the media. I started to question myself — was I right in choosing to do work that was unusual to the point of alienating me from the music scene? — The answer came only when David Byrne bought an old album of mine from 1976, 'Estudando O Samba' (Studying the Samba) on a visit to Rio. He got in touch with me and we were able to recuperate all this material that was otherwise largely unknown".