Tom Ze Is Crazy

It’s only in the past year that I’ve really begun to dig into world music. For a long time, I admired it from afar like a museum piece, nodding appreciatively at the names that every “cultured” critic feted and filing the entire thing away as “something to be listened to when I’m ready to admit I’m middle aged.” It was kinda like that New Years Resolution that never quite got past the first month (“I know it’s good for me, but…”).

But in the past year or so, two things happened: Tom Ze and Balkan music. I’ve addressed the latter elsewhere, but the former is the thing that rudely and forcefully broadened my musical horizons the most.

For me, I often find that the way into records are the stories associated with them. Ze’s latest record, Estudando o Pagode serves up a nice one: it’s apparently “a three act operetta about women and their relationship to men.” And how is that relationship defined? The picture above should tell you: he regards men as homeless. In an interview with Pitchfork he elaborates, men are “being[s] that live in want of affection. And the women are quite right not to give it.” Aurally, Ze uses donkey brays, instruments made with ficus leaves and, on “Vibração de Carne” (“Vibrations of the Flesh”) what sounds like a mighty believable orgasm.

Ze’s road to the near-universal adulation of Estudando o Pagode has been a long one. While Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil enjoyed massive success throughout their careers, Ze was practically forgotten during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Depressed about the state of his career, he began to work at his nephew’s gas station. Luckily, David Byrne ran into 1976’s Estudando o Samba while on a trip to Brazil on a search for records in the early ’90s and fell in love.

Byrne’s Luaka Bop label has since been releasing Ze’s records and resurrecting his legacy to its proper place as one of the originators of the Tropicalia movement and the only one left making music as vital, interesting and, yes, crazy as it was back in the ‘60s.