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Estudando o Pagode - Na Opereta Segregamulher e Amor
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Biography
Tom Zé was born in Irará (Bahia, Northeast Brazil). The musical reference points of his youth were the cocos by Jackson do Pandeiro, the forros by Luiz Gonzaga, the local folklore, washerwoman's sambas de roda, and violeiros' cantigas, together with the mass idols broadcast by the omnipresent Rádio Nacional (which was available – together with electricity – in 1949). He fell in love with music by listening to the radio. He arrived in Salvador in 1951.
Later, he joined the CPC, a popular culture center that acted as cultural resistance organizations during the military dictatorship, researched folklore, and producing culture based on the findings. After some partnerships with the poet José Carlos Capinam for folkloric dances like bumba-meu-boi and chegança, CPC members criticized him as he was becoming repetitive. He hadn't accepted the criticism ("folklore is always the same"), but he enrolled at the Music College of Bahia. After a basic course to learn the rudiments of written music, he studied with such luminaries as H.J. Koellreuter (music history), Piero Bastianelli, Walter Smetak (violoncello), Aida Zolinger (piano), Edy Cajueiro (violão), Ernest Widmer (composition), Yulo Brandão (counterpoint), Jamari Oliveira (harmony), Lindembergue Cardoso (instrumentation), and Sérgio Magnani (orchestration), practicing harmony, composition, piano and cello.
Tom Zé began his career together with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Maria Bethânia. As a composer, he influenced Caetano and many others and delivered an expressive body of work through his own discography. A restless thinker, he was adept at modern erudite music experimentations, yet both industry and audiences always ignored him until David Byrne discovered him. He can be better understood through his self-coined definition: "I don't make art, I make spoken and sung journalism."
In 1963, he became acquainted with Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in Salvador, where actress Maria Muniz promoted weekly musical get-togethers, also frequented by musicians and young artists such as Fernando Lona, Alcyvando Luz, Orlando Senna, Maria Lígia, and Álvaro Guimarães. On September 7, 1964, Zé had his opening night a the musical directed by Caetano Veloso (Nós por Exemplo No. 2), with Caetano, Gil, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, Alcyvando Luz, Perna Fróes (still known as Antônio Renato), and percussionist Djalma Corrêa. Soon, he joined the other Baianos in the Nova Bossa Velha — Velha Bossa Nova Show and in 1965, in the musical Arena Conta Bahia, which included his composition (with Chico de Assis), "O Cachorro do Inglês." The musical was such a success that Caetano, Gal, Gil, Bethânia, and Zé were invited to record their singles through RCA. Then, in the same year, Zé debuted in the record business with his single "Maria do Colégio da Bahia." His "Parque Industrial" was recorded on the album/manifesto Tropicália, and he recorded his first LP Tom Zé (Rozemblit, a record label based in Recife). His "São Paulo, meu Amor" won first place at TV Record's IV FMPB (São Paulo), and got fourth place and the Best Lyrics award at the same festival with "2001" (with Rita Lee).
In 1969, he performed in Rio and São Paulo with Gal Costa in the show O Som Livre de Tom Zé e Gal Costa. In 1970, he recorded Tom Zé through RGE. The next year, he opened a music course in São Paulo, Sofist Balacobaco — muito som e pouco papo. In 1972, he recorded Tom Zé through Continental, followed by 1973's Todos os Olhos, 1976's Estudando o Samba, and 1977's Correio da Estação do Brás, all for the same label. In 1974, he gave a concert with the band Capote, in São Paulo. In 1975, he worked on the Brazilian staging of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as an actor. In 1976, he toured the university circuit with Vicente Barreto. In 1984, he went to RGE, where he released Nave Maria, and Continental re-released his 1972's Tom Zé as Se o Caso é Chorar. In all this time, he continued to make sporadic appearances, but was still almost completely ignored by the masses due to his unusual approach in music with plenty of irony, erudite music references, and the utilization of self-made instruments. Zé was so depressed that he decided to return to his small home town to work at his nephew's gas station. In 1989 while visiting Brazil, David Byrne found a used exemplar of Estudando o Samba, which he took as a didactic work. When he listened the album, he was immediately taken by Zé's sound and called Arto Lindsay, who gave him what information he had about Zé. When a Brazilian journalist from a renowned newspaper interviewed Byrne, he saw a note on his desk, "When in Brazil, look for Tom Zé." He reported that and Zé was alerted. Radiant, he phoned Caetano for more info and Caetano replied that it shouldn't be about him, but about Tuzé de Abreu, Byrne's friend. The fact yielded some reserves by Zé in interviews. Byrne then took Zé as the first artist of his label Luaka Bop. His releases there would get favorable reviews in The New York Times, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Le Monde, and win the Creativity Award in Telluride, CO. In 1991, his album The Best of Tom Zé was appointed by vote the third best album by critics and fourth by the readers of Downbeat. In 1992, he recorded The Hips of Tradition (Luaka Bop), participating in the Zurich Jazz Festival in Switzerland. He then departed for a successful series of tours in Europe and the U.S. He is the first and only Brazilian musician to be presented at New York's MoMa (1993), and the first and only Latin American composer to be presented at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He also opened a concert at the Lift — London International Festival of Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. He performed concerts and festivals in Canada (Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton, Saskatoon) and New York and in August, as part of 20th Century Artist and at Summerstage, Central Park. In 1994, he worked on the film Sábado (Ugo Giorgetti) and toured through Amsterdam, Berlin, Switzerland, and France. In 1995 and 1996, he toured the biggest capitals of Brazil. In the same year, he wrote (together with José Miguel Wisnik) the "Parabelo" soundtrack for Grupo Corpo (a modern ballet company), which brought them the APCA award.
Release
If you have access to Brazilian artists reviews in the foreign press, you might be surprised. Who has been received more enthusiastically in the last years? Who is considered the most original of all? None of those you are thinking of. Check some excerpts:
“In a memorable rare performance in New York …. an ardent communicator …. stimulates the crowd to sing along an incomprehensible tune,” The New York Times published.
“His dadaist sensibility is far beyond anyone [from the Tropicália generation],” one could read in The Guardian, from London.
“Nothing sound so visionary and radical sa his songs,” published The Boston Phoenix.
“No pop star, anywhere, have been making so irresistable songs and still much farther out,” wrote a Rolling Stone critic when elaborating the list of the ten best albums in the nineties.
“It is the way he arranges [the sounds truly from Bahia] that makes him a genious,” is what weekly mazagazine from New York Time Out concluded.
“At 65 the Brazilian singer goes on to invent very politicized unrestrained music,” wrote Le Monde from Paris.
Many other citations of the same tenor can be extracted from many other fascinated critiques which describe the art from the Brazilian whiz who never lets himself be neither defeated by indulgence nor dumbfolded by glory. He does not allow his criativity to dissipate in the void of adulation in times when ignorance is lauded and an opportunist shot puts a glorious foot in someone’s mouth. On the contrary, he jumps ahead as a nimble cat and brings what is so claimed and wanted in Brazilian music: ideas. Tom Zé supplies Brazil and those around the world who wish to know about the country with his intriguing ideas, which seem to have no commitment to mass media, not even by far. Records and shows are created from unconventional ideas translated into messages that even go past the elements of music itself and daringly advance to areas out of the songwriter’s limits. Tom Zé captivates dissimilar audiences who nonetheless identify themselves with his sonic language and apparently incoherent illogical looks but with such surreal a texture that coherence as much as logic are positively present.
The principles code in Tom Zé’s work is conducted by feminine presence, mithology, ritual character, pun, recurrences and citations, sonic experimentalism and messages of social-economical aspect.
“Tom Zé, the Zénial” (Le Nouvel Observateur), “The Zéneral” (Les Inrockuptibles) does to the song exactly what Hermeto Pascoal does to his instrumental tunes. Both cast music in a different mould. A new Tom Zé record is a treat to Brazil’s intelligence. So, let’s talk about his new album, released by Trama.
The inspiration came from the backroom of his apartment in Perdizes, in the west of the city of São Paulo. On weekend evenings he witnessed scenes of the upper middle class parties in neighbor buildings. They were dominated by pagode in a wide range of themes other than the traditional ones, linked to everyday circumstances. He has decided to penetrate into pagode and exemplify sixteen different styles in an operetta. The first out of its six acts is called Mulheres de Apenas, which reveals two constant elements in Tom Zé’s life and work: mithology and women. Tom Zé has been interested in Greek mythology since he was 40 years old. When French actor Michel Simon made speeches in Bahia, Tom Zé sang a song, “A Pastorinha”, and got to know she was a Greek tragedy character. That originated an interest in mythology in such a way that he listens to his wife Neusa read excerpts from classics aloud every day. The presence of a choir, characters’ names as Mônica Sol Musa (a hint at Mônica Salmaso, one of the several singers who are implicitly cited for having recorded his songs) and some figures printed in the libretto are evident signs of this connection.
The woman is the central theme in the album, be she powerful or subdued – the oppressed object-woman Tom Zé has been attracted and frightened since he was a boy and wrote a crazy song to his first girlfriend. More strongly present than in previous works such as “Mã” (and its somber atmosphere on album Estudando o Samba, released in 1976) or the beautiful “Carta” (from Correio da Estação do Brás, released in 1978), Tom Zé’s fear, admiration, submission and pleasure in respect to the woman are widely exposed in the first pagode already – “Ave Dor Maria” (in the scene Mulher É o Mal). He reaches farther and farther into them along the three acts – as in the donkey’s orgastic groans in “Estúpido Rapaz”; and other pagode titles such as “Quero pensar (A Mulher de Bach)”, “Vibração da Carne” and “Prazer Carnal” – to the final scene, A Mulher da UNE. In his work, the feminine presence is powerful and the man, powerless a lot of times, is beaten up as a defenseless creature which confess its extravagances and fetishes when begging for a companion.
Tom Zé is an eminent pun expert whose complete works deserve a deep study in this aspect. On this album, the paly on words is evident in characters’ names and lyrics such as “Para Lá do Pará”: “What you think / I know that you think / the woman doesn’t think / but she does.”
The recurrences and citations pop up numerously in Tom Zé’s work. The title Estudando o Pagode refers to the album Estudando o Samba (1976); “Ave Dor Maria” recalls “Nave Maria”; and “Beatles a Granel” was a line from “Amar” (on the album The Hips of Tradition released in 1992), bearing the same melody, but now among different lines and arrangement. In “Quero Pensar (A Mulher de Bath)” he approaches Pedro Caetano’s “É com Esse que Eu Vou” and “A Felicidade”, inverting the original concept of Vinicius de Moraes’s bossa nova. In “A Volta do Trem das Onze (8,5 Milhões de Km2)” Tom Zé not only flirts with the title but also, and in several other ways, with Adoniran Barbosa’s samba. There are other examples to be detected.
Tom Zé’s sonic experimentalism comes from the course at the Escola de Música da Universidade Federal da Bahia (the federal university music school in Bahia state) with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a great Brazilian popular music teacher. Bric-a-brac and bricolage are part of Tom Zé’s vivid sound. Household appliances and even an emery-wheel used in previous works are present in the form of sound sculpture timbres as the ones from blowing bottles or a ficus leaf in “Para Lá do Pará”.
The attention to the social-economical scene has been reflected in Tom Zé’s work since Tropicália. Now the open letter to president Lula published in Imprensa magazine in January, 2003, is epitomized in the last but one album track, which severely reproves the dismantlement of the Brazilian railway net, a cause of the suffocation of the country’s product transportation system. Trains are one of Tom Zé’s favorite subjects.
At last, it is worth mentioning that in Tom Zé’s songs there is an indelible bond with the city praised since 1968, when he was the winner of the IV Festival da TV Record (a music contest promoted by the TV channel). The protitutes who invaded the city center in that period; the estrangement between Edifício Itália’s (the city’s highest building) and Hilton Hotel’s habitués; the changes occured along the years on Augusta and Consolação streets and Angélica avenue; and the Sun Curve in Interlagos racecourse – they are all remarks about the city where Tom Zé has been living since he left Irará (an inland town in Bahia state) with a stopover in Salvador (its capital). His life and the inspiration for his work spring up from São Paulo, a metropolis which swallows itself, which incoherently and illogically torments and gives presents, which welcomes with open arms and clenched fists, and which possesses a sphinx soul that northeastern fellow Tom Zé understands better than most citizens.
Zuza Homem de Mello – March, 2005
Trama Rua Ada Negri, 469 São Paulo - SP - Brazil 04755 000