On October 5, the belatedly renowned Brazilian avant-pop
musician Tom Zé released Estudando a
Bossa: Nordeste Plaza, his seventh album since
1990 and fifth since 1998. This means that between the ages of 62 and 74, Tom
Zé created close to four hours of songs that I expect to play with pleasure
when and if I reach 74. Cognizant that whens get iffier in an artist's
seventies, Luaka Bop, where five of Zé's albums appeared—the other two are on
the Brazilian labels Trama and Irara, the latter a DIY operation named after
Zé's hometown in the Bahia backlands—supplied him with a second October 5
release. The box set Studies of Tom Zé:
Explaining Things So I Can Confuse You is built around three
remastered vinyl versions of Zé's "Estudando" series—"estudando"
meaning "studying," the topics samba in general and the hyperromantic
pop samba called pagode as well as
bossa nova on the new one. The audio upgrade is striking especially on Zé's
first and finest U.S. album, Brazil
Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits. Whether improved hi-fi and
a few extras are worth $70 list you can judge by perusing this description, which I wrote to the same
end that Luaka Bop concocted the box: to get people to notice Tom Zé, an artist
worthy of your attention and excitement, your amusement and wonder.
Next to the U.S. and arguably
Great Britain, Brazil is home to the richest popular music culture in the world—a
culture of extraordinary rhythmic wealth, harmonic savoir-faire, verbal
ambition, historical complexity, and intellectual ferment. Were I a fan of the
music these factors have produced, I could mount an even more convincing case
for Tom Zé. Instead I'll just say that many Tom Zé boosters share my
disinterest in samba and its innumerable relatives and derivatives. Where
almost all Brazilian pop cultivates a smoothness, Zé is rough, spiky, peculiar,
blatantly avant-garde. Yet he never sacrifices melody or ignores groove and is
often hooky, as befits a onetime jingle writer who's said that no cultural
treasure matches an enduring folk tune. There's no one like him—the vaguely
similar Captain Beefheart is a big baby having a tantrum by comparison. Zé is
so much kinder, wiser, saner.
For reasons I've understood
better since the Zé box inspired me to finally read Caetano Veloso's critical
memoir Tropical Truth, Brazilian music doesn't
mesh too good with rock and roll. In the U.S. it attracts mostly jazz fans, an
affair that began with the circa-1957 invention of bossa nova by Joao Gilberto,
who turned samba into a sophisticated "new thing" by complicating its
chords, understating its beats, and murmuring its vocals. Veloso adores
Gilberto—"popular music is the Brazilian form of expression par
excellence," declares this well-read cineaste, and "Joao takes
popular music upon himself as the determinant of what truth we might be
permitted and could create." In contrast, the pop that Yanks were rocking
around the clock in the '50s was "too simple,"
"unoriginal," with a "whorehouse-edge."
Tropical Truth is Veloso's eyewitness history of Bahia-generated tropicalia, which in
the late '60s responded dialectically to bossa nova by reconfiguring the left
orthodoxy of the broadly influential Musica Popular Brasileira movement at what
it considered a higher level of radical consciousness. But ultimately Veloso's
book, which praises many writers and filmmakers as well as musicians, is an
argument for all of Brazil as culture and nation—and as such the most
accomplished criticism by a pop musician I know. There's juicier writing about
musicians from Robert Johnson to Ricky Nelson in Bob Dylan's Chronicles. But Dylan doesn't approach—nor,
simple Ricky Nelson fan that he is, aspire to—the theoretical grasp of Veloso,
whose empathy and precision had me speeding happily through decriptions of
artist after artist I'd never heard of.
By 1965, the restless pop scene
Veloso celebrates was a staple of both TV programming and highbrow critique;
his first published essay attacked a 1966 book that inveighed against bossa
nova's class politics (a whole book! in 1966!). He describes these developments
so vividly that I returned with fresh ears to the seminal eccentric Gilberto,
who I once considered oversubtle and now enjoy in a contemplative way, and the
young rock band Os Mutantes, who I once considered overelaborate and now hear
as melodically uncanny adolescent gigglefritzes who hadn't yet gone the way of
all prog. Veloso is so effusive and convincing about the musicality of his
tropicalia comrade Gilberto Gil, who was imprisoned with him in 1968 and served
from 2003 to 2008 as Lula da Silva's minister of culture, that I also heard
more on my second pass at Gil's breakaway albums Gilberto Gil (1968, with Os Mutantes) and Expresso 2222 (1972, might as well have
been).
Then there's the music of
Veloso himself. With Gil I've been a fan in principle since 1982's grooveful Um Banda Um although it took Veloso to
teach me that for Gil, a dark-skinned doctor's son who came late to black
consciousness, harmony and melody are paramount—that like so many Brazilian
musicians he's ultimately a child of Joao Gilberto. Veloso, the proudly
Europhile son of a telegraph operator, has always been a trickier read, and I
do mean read. His penetrating delicacy as a singer can't be denied by anyone
who's caught his cameo in Pedro Almodovar's Talk
to Her, but one reason the man is
so into it is that he cares about lyrics as a songwriter, an interpreter, and
for that matter a critic. Only if so, how does anyone who doesn't understand
Portuguese address the oft-heard claim that Veloso is nothing less than the
world's premier popular musician?
I've made progress with
Veloso by bearing down on 1989's Estrangeiro,
produced by Brazilian-raised no wave graduate Arto Lindsay, and 2003's The Best of Caetano Veloso, which leads with Estrangeiro's title song—Veloso's single
most compelling track, greatly intensified by a trot in which he situates Paul
Gauguin, Cole Porter, and Claude Levi-Strauss on Rio's Guanabara Bay before
exploring his own tropical alienation in fact and metaphor. Like every Nonesuch
Veloso, The Best of Caetano Veloso
provides Portuguese lyrics alongside their translations so you can follow sound
and meaning together. But though this is the most we can hope, to me it's never
enough, because while printed lyrics are invaluable, the best way to hear music
is with your ears. That's why groove musics, usually dance musics, breach
language barriers more easily than song musics. There are too many exceptions
to this generalization to enumerate or explain, but sonic distinction, vocal
character, vocal virtuosity, and nonverbal humor are all common mitigating
factors. And where Veloso is the kind of great pop singer who makes up for what
he lacks in vocal character with vocal virtuosity and vice versa, Tom Zé has
significant strengths in all but vocal virtuosity.
Although Zé was aligned with tropicalia,
Charles A. Perrone's 1983 Masters of
Contemporary Brazilian Song barely mentions him, where
Christopher Dunn's 2001 tropicalia study Brutality
Garden gives him a chunk of its
final chapter. What happened in between was that Luaka Bop headman David Byrne
discovered Zé by accident in a Rio de Janeiro LP bin just when Zé was about to
give up on his musical career. Zé's father was a street vendor who used a
lottery jackpot to start a textile store in Irara, a settlement so pre-modern
that Zé saw electricity arrive there as a kid. He had some minor pop success in
the '60s, even taking over Veloso and Gil's televised revue Divine Marvelous for a few weeks after
they were detained. But he also studied classical music at the University of
Bahia with Swiss and German emigres dedicated to dodecaphony, instrument
fabrication, and avant-traditional Euro-Brazilian fusion. Usually such
connections signal the presence of interesting minds at best and misbegotten
wankery the rest of the time. One reason Zé sounds like no one else is that he
puts all these ideas into effective practice.
Veloso has said that where
bossa nova made unusual chords flow, tropicalia juxtaposed standard-issue major
chords oddly. With Zé, it's more like juxtaposing unusual chords so they move
smartly, usually in a staccato samba rhythm. He's been inventing instruments
since the '70s, including a primitive sampler utilizing taped radio frequencies
called the HertZé and a kazoo constructed from the leaves of Sao Paulo's
ubiquitous ficus tree. And perhaps because he grew up in a culture considerably
more oral and "primitive" than that of most Brazilians, he uses the
avant to flavor the trad rather than the other way around.
Reimmersing in Zé's albums
was both more revelatory and more pleasurable than such
nice-work-if-you-can-get-it can be. They'd all been A's by me, but the only
ones that didn't improve as I listened were the first two, which had already
become life favorites on a C-90 I took on vacation for years—especially the
first, Byrne's cherry-picked improvement on Estudando
o Samba, which he turned into Brazil
Classics 4. Recorded mostly when Zé was about 40, it mines his beginnings
as a guitar-strumming chronicler of Irara—his voice is still supple enough to
sweeten his adept tunes, yet never undercuts what Veloso describes as "his
ill-humored observations expressed in a rural accent that revealed rather than
obscured the classical elegance of his educated and correct
Portuguese." Zé's minimalism
is out front in such titles as "Ma," "Hein?,"
"Doi," "Vai," and "To" ("I'm"), with
lyrics to match. The eccentric percussion—one effect involves a blender—is
always beatwise. But the album sticks in the mind most vividly via the guitar
riffs that anchor "Ma," "Nave Maria," and "Augusta,
Angelica e Consolacao," the latter two Byrne add-ons. As for how it
studies samba, my understanding is so rudimentary that I can only say I know
I'd love it even more if I got the references, which I bet are sometimes in the
spare beats.
Released in 1992, Brazil Classics 5: The Return of Tom Ze: The
Hips of Tradition elaborates a similar approach, although on the surface
the traditions are often literary rather than musical—Faulkner, Simon Schama,
Stanislaw Lem, many Brazilians. Past 55 by then, Zé enlisted more instrumental
and vocal help in delivering his melodies—including the female choruses toward
which he'd soon gravitate. His next Luaka Bop release came six years later: a
concept album, let's call a spade a spade, entitled Fabrication Defect. At 62, Zé changed his music
considerably, and although Massive Hits
will always be my first love, I've come to prefer this late phase—its
reach-grasp problems are within reason, and its music keeps unfolding. Every
time I listen I notice some new melodic curve or harmonic wrinkle, some sly
fissure or chuckle in Zé's creaky voice, some humorous turn in the melodicism
of his helpmeets, some unlikely sound, some hint of an idea.
What has become my favorite
of these albums has plenty of vocals but very few words and is already
unavailable every which way but digital even though it was self-released only
four years ago. While devoid of Zé the cancionista, the 30-minute, seven-track Danc-Eh-Sa has everything else
non-Lusophones love him for: the hooks, the sounds, the beats, the irreverence.
But for Zé to put himself out there in such pure form also helps me appreciate
what can happen when I can read along. For me, his other Brazil-only release,
2001's enjoyable Jogos de Armar—which
comes with a 44-minute bonus disc of riffs, lines, and tracks lifted from the
main disc to help others plagiarize him—tends to recede into the conceptual
distance with no English-language documentation to anchor it.
The three Luaka Bop albums
offer English in abundance, and it adds something. The songs on Fabrication Defect address an explicit
theme with Zé's typical array of warmth and irony, asperity and obscurity: that
the Third World's "rapidly increasing population" of
"`androids'" are afflicted with "inborn `defects': they think,
they dance, they dream." Estudando o
Pagode is a scattershot samba
operetta about the oppression of women with female choruses all over it and
many high points, from the Greek chorus of cartoon characters reciting the Hail
Mary at the beginning to "Beatles by the Bushel" at the end. My
favorite track, situated "Scene IV—Gay-Lesbian Parade," is called
"Elaeu," a very Zéesque conflation of "she" and
"I." This album has wheels within wheels. I look for excuses to play
it again.
As befits its subject, the
new Estudando o Bossa is lighter and
more immediate, with nearly every fetching melody shared if not borne by yet
another fetching female singer with her own register, timbre, and presence. I
know there are melodic and lyrical in-jokes that Brazilians will get and I won't,
and I wish someone would explicate—in English. But here there are references I
do understand—two songs praising Joao Gilberto, another that has a laugh about
"Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da," namechecked singers who ring a bell. I'll take
its pervasive beauty as an old man's reconciliation with a Rio lyricism whose
class politics he rejected as a Bahia youth who knew a little about harmony
himself. And I'll note that though Veloso brought Zé south and Byrne saved him
from returning to Irara to run a gas station, he's long resided not in Rio but
a few hundred miles west in industrial Sao Paulo, where he can comfortably
remain as spiky as he wants for as long as he likes. Or not, if that's where he
chooses to take the new music I trust we'll be hearing soon enough.
Except in the name of its hero, no diacritical marks were exploited in
the publication of this essay.
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