Europe Jazz Network
MUSICIANS

TOM ZÉ

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". "Recuperate" is still a key word in Brazil 5 - The Return of Tom Zé' - The Hips of Tradition. "The majority of tracks were conjured", Tom Zé says, "from the 'splinters, portions, little pieces, ideas' composed, assembled and disassembled over the years of his exile. "Some of the songs I sang live, some of them I recorded as demos, but they were all substantially different from what ended up on the record. They were always in different stages of incompleteness". Two tracks are old favorites of Tom: the samba "Irecema", by composer Adoniran Barbosa, and "Tai", which used to be a spirited carnival song from Carmen Miranda's repertoire (penned by her friend Joubert de Carvalho) turned inside out by Tom Zé. "The Hips of Tradition is", in Tom Zé's words, "basically about rhythm. Harmony is almost absent from his work. Even tonality isn't a concern. On many tracks the bass and guitar are playing a continuum. They have shifted from their roles as harmonic and melodic instruments to become almost part of the rhythm section. Even the cavaquinhos (small, high- pitched guitars, typical of Brazilian urban music) are playing in odd intervals, as far as possible from tonality". Tom Zé's choice of rhythm as the central idea for this album was - as everything in his work is - a very careful, thoughtful one. "Rhythm", he says, "is the body and soul of Northeastern music". And even though he has been living in the southern metropolis of Sao Paulo for the past three decades, the spiritual, musical and emotional patterns of his native Northeast are still his deepest and most basic nourishment. And because Sao Paulo has become a major magnet for cheap, expendable Northeastern labor, Tom Zé chose to comment on this by pitching the harsh rhythmic modes of the "sertao" - the bandlands - against the softer, gentler tones of the southern city. "Southern music, especially 'caipira' (country) music is soft and melodic, while Northeastern music is dry", he says, "I've described it, in the liner notes I wrote for my first American album, as a 'dehydrated god'". It is, he says, more than a metaphor for daily life in the Northeast of Brazil - a region chronically plagued by droughts, floods, unemployment and famine, and at the same time, a generous spring of music, poetry, theater, literature. "Northeastern life is mind-boggling", Tom Zé says. "On one hand, you barely have a survival level of existence, nourished only by the simplest, harshest foods: manioc flour and sun-dried meats. But on the other hand, you have a rich, varied and frequently illiterate cultural life". Tom Zé dedicated the album to a master Northeastern musician, singer and composer who is not featured on the record: Jackson do Pandeiro (see "Brazil 3 - Forro", etc). "It is", Tom says, a larger and deeper tribute than the mere recording of one of his many songs. "When I was young in Bahia, my friends and I were crazy about Jackson. We had all his records. We thought his music was beautiful. We especially liked the way he divided the melody, the rhythm in his singing, his grace and his subtlety in twisting words around the rhythm. This is the connection between this album and Jackson do Pandeiro and Northeastern musicians in general - they all love to play with rhythm - make the rhythm complex, pleasurable, tasty". Tom Zé says he suddenly remembered Jackson after re-reading a favorite book, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. "There's this scene in 'The Magic Mountain' where the main character sits at some Russians' table and hears them talking. To his ears, Mann writes, Russian sounded like a language with no bones, no joints. When I recalled that scene in Mann's book, I thought that rhythm is the bones, the joints of Northeastern life. It is what supports this harsh ascetic life". "By the way", Tom Zé adds, "Mann was half German, half Brazilian. His mother was a carioca (native of Rio de Janeiro), Dona Julia". Will Tom Zé's closer relationship with the US spoil his entrenched love for all things Brazilian? He doesn't think so. Mainly because Tom Zé almost never listens to music. Any music. "Music is work for me, not leisure. So I don't listen to it when I'm not working. I'm not aware of any musicians or bands or musical styles anywhere in the world". What does he listen to in his free time? "Transmission of soccer games on the radio. Or maybe news, even though politics have become quite unbearable, lately". Anna Maria Bahiana, September 1992