Tom Ze, the engineer of Tropicalia rediscovered twenty years later

Tom Zé was never the best loved of the tropicalistas, and for years he was not even the best remembered one. Between 1968, the year of the Tropicália manifesto, and 1990, the year David Byrne’s label put him back into circulation with a compilation, a little more than twenty years go by in which the rest of the movement becomes official history of Brazilian music while he, instead, all but disappears. This is not the story of a whole life: it is the story of a method, that of a composer who has always treated the song as a mechanism to be taken apart, and of how that method first isolated him and then saved him.

A conservatory student among the tropicalistas

Tom Zé, stage name of Antônio José Santana Martins, was born on 11 October 1936 in Irará, in the Bahian backlands. He moved to Salvador and enrolled at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, where he studied with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, Walter Smetak and Ernst Widmer, among others, and joined the Grupo de Compositores da Bahia. He later taught counterpoint and harmony at the same school.

Of these teachers, Walter Smetak matters most for the point this piece wants to make. A Swiss composer naturalized Brazilian, Smetak built his own instruments, the so called “plásticas sonoras”: an idea of music as an object to be assembled, not only performed. That is where Tom Zé’s most recognizable trait comes from, the one that would later earn him the word “engineer”: the composer as someone who takes a piece apart to see what it is made of, then puts it back together differently, often with materials that were never meant to make music.

1968: the credit that does not sing its own song

By 1968 Tom Zé was already inside Tropicália’s inner circle. He appears as a writer on Tropicália: ou Panis et Circenses, the collective album that gives the movement its name, alongside Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Nara Leão and Os Mutantes. His is “Parque Industrial”, one of the record’s most quoted tracks: he wrote it, but it is sung by Gil, Gal, Caetano and Os Mutantes, passed from voice to voice inside a single song like a baton. It already says something about his place in the movement: inside the room where things are written, one step back from the center of the stage.

That same year he released his own debut album, Grande Liquidação, backed by two São Paulo psychedelic rock bands, Os Brazões and Os Versáteis, with his own version of “Parque Industrial” among its twelve tracks. Also in 1968 he won the IV Festival da Música Popular Brasileira, promoted by TV Record, with the song “São Paulo”. He was not a newcomer at the margins: he was an already awarded, already heard, already central author. What would set him apart from the others arrived only a few years later.

Todos os Olhos, then silence

In 1973 Todos os Olhos was released, on Continental. The record is dissonant and disorienting, built on a language that critics and the public alike could not follow: too far ahead, said the few who wrote about it. It is the breaking point. Instead of chasing the visibility that Veloso and Gil built up over the following years, Tom Zé stepped away from the media and, according to the Dicionário Cravo Albin, worked in advertising for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Across the whole of the 1980s he released a single album, Nave Maria (1984): the commercial low point of his career.

It is in these years, tellingly, that the engineering turns into a hands-on practice. He built homemade electro-acoustic instruments, among them the HertZé, described by Luaka Bop as a kind of analog sampler wired to pre-recorded tapes, capable of producing random bursts of sound.¹ Those instruments were lost by the end of the decade; they survive only in scattered footage. By the late 1980s, according to the same source, Tom Zé was considering going back to Irará to run a cousin’s gas station.

The record bin in Rio

David Byrne, in New York, listened to Estudando o Samba (1976) and heard something closer to the New York downtown scene than to the Rio samba of the time: an avant-garde samba, angular, filtered through a composer’s ear rather than a singer’s.² In 1989 Byrne was in Bahia to film the documentary Ilê Aiyê (The House of Life), and used the trip to look for the album’s author. A segment on Jornal da Globo, reported by journalist Maurício Kubrusly, documented the meeting: Byrne handed Tom Zé a cassette inscribed “Tom Zé, obrigado por sua música e inspiração.”³

In 1990 Luaka Bop, the label Byrne had just founded, released as its very first title Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé, Massive Hits: fifteen tracks drawn from Estudando o Samba, Todos os Olhos and Nave Maria on the original edition (the reissue on streaming today gathers twenty). Tom Zé became the label’s first signed artist. Critic Robert Christgau would later name it among the ten best albums of the 1990s. Twenty years after Tropicália, the record no one in Brazil wanted to press anymore became an international way in.

Fabricated with a defect

The comeback, arriving after Tom Zé had already turned sixty, produced the most complete work of his second career: Com Defeito de Fabricação / Fabrication Defect (1998, Luaka Bop). It is a concept album that imagines the peoples of the postcolonial Global South as “androids” catalogued by their former colonizers through a list of “defects”, defects the record reclaims as proof of humanity, the effrontery to “think, dance and dream”, in a stated echo of Jean Genet’s philosophy on the value of what dominant society calls deviant. A trilogy of “study” records followed, Estudando o Pagode and Estudando a Bossa, picking up in their titles the same analytical approach as Estudando o Samba two decades earlier: not a genre to be performed, but a genre to be studied, opened up, checked.

What remains

What remains of Tom Zé is not the biography of a genius rediscovered by chance, however true and verifiable the story of the record bin in Rio may be. What remains is a method that runs across sixty years without changing nature: a homemade instrument built in the 1980s and an analog sample pulled from a tape are not stage tricks, they are the same idea Walter Smetak had shown him at university in Bahia, applied to different materials. The Tropicália usually told is the one of disarming beauty, color, songs that endure. Tom Zé is its necessary counter-proof: Tropicália read as a technical problem, a piece to be opened up to see how it works, before even asking how it sounds.

Notes

The description of the HertZé as an analog sampler wired to pre-recorded tapes comes from the Luaka Bop artist page. ↩
On the reading of Estudando o Samba as avant-garde samba see Guilherme Araujo Freire, Tom Zé’s 1970s artistic output and the album Estudando o Samba, Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 68 (2017), text. ↩
The 1989 meeting and the cassette Byrne handed over are documented by Pop Fantasma. ↩