Um oh e um ah
I discovered the world of Tom Zé thanks to my passion for The Talking Heads. Yes, it's one of those chains of life that really fascinate me whose memory it’s always a great pleasure. For example, Paul McCartney led me to discover The Beatles (although it seems it should be the other way around), but also to Elvis Costello, Carl Davis, Freelance Hellraiser, Youth and Super Furry Animals. In turn, Elvis Costello made me fascinated with Tom Waits who let me to love the cinema of Jim Jarmusch. Thanks to him, a Dead Man made me love the music of Neil Young. The group Radio Futura discovered me the treasures of Caetano Veloso and Compay Segundo, opening to me all the vast universe of Brazilian and Cuban music, almost without limits. Hence I arrive to Vinicius de Moraes, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto who along with Stan Getz lit up the sixties with their girl from Ipanema. With Stan Getz, jazz came into my life. I still dance with it.
David Byrne, the main head of The Talking Heads, created in the late eighties the label Luaka Bop and Tom Zé became rediscovered for the world through a two-volume compilation. I came to them much later, at the time in which a baobab shaped as music program grew to the final death in the middle of a television oasis called Channel 33 of the Catalan public television. Yes, the program was called Baobab, also home to many of the mentioned chains that I love. I discovered there Frank Zappa and Tom Zé. So I searched his records and came across the compilation released by David Byrne long ago. I saw, I bought it and I enjoyed it. And so it’s been for many years, and it will.
Tom Zé was born in 1936 in Irara of Bahia in Brazil within a wealthy family. In the late sixties he became a protagonist figure of the renewal of Brazilian music within the movement known as Tropicalista. Tropicalismo arrived as a messianic bird in a redemptive mood. It was the seventies or late sixties, when Brazilian music emerged again from its powerful ashes, so the bossa nova had been emerged just a few years before reaching sales over The Beatles with that girl from Ipanema full of grace cherished by Stan Getz sax and Joao Gilberto's voice. Yes, however, Brazilian music had much more to create and psychedelic sound arrived thanks to Os Mutantes and then Tropicalismo with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and who we are concerned, the most eccentric of all, Tom Zé.
His work is prolific, very experimental and loaded with a huge sense of humor. He went unnoticed in the eighties, but today, 74 years old, is more creative than ever, a perfect UM OH!.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by Kleide Teixeira