Fabricating Tom Zé

I just came back from the Museum of Modern Art and a screening of Fabricando Tom Zé, a documentary about the brilliant and idiosyncratic Brazilian composer, one of the founders of the fantastic and fascinating Tropicalia movement of the ’60s. (eMusic has a lot of his incredible music, and I suggest you check out some of it forthwith.)

After being a key player in the Tropicalia scene, Zé languished for years, working at a gas station, until 1989, when David Byrne discovered his music by accident at a Rio record store and signed him to his new label, Luaka Bop – only then did Brazil, and the world, realize what it had.

A verité film pegged to a summer 2005 European tour, Fabricando is patchy with its biographical detail – we visit the schoolroom Zé attended as a child, for instance, but get little sense of his sophisticated musical education and development. But that kind of stuff you can read about elsewhere – the real attraction of the film is getting so close to such a character, and since director Decio Matos, Jr., is a good friend of Zé’s, it’s very close. Zé’s an eccentric bird, prone to statements like “The bird that sings too much craps in his own nest” and lecturing the camera to look both ways before crossing the street. I loved how he described the audience at one show, fanned out in a vast, steep old ampitheatre, as “7,000 people set out as if they were a continuation of your belly.” His dour wife/manager seems to provide some semblance of grounding, but even she begins weeping at a poorly received show.

Zé is charming in a loopy way, but he certainly can be petulant too – witness an epic shit-fit he throws at soundcheck at the Montreux Jazz Festival, claiming that he is not being respected; this very small, very slight man proves so intimidating that he manages to bully the hulking soundman right off the stage. And yet he also shows a very credible and droll self-effacing quality too. The piano and the vacuum cleaner (he famously used the latter in some of his early work), Zé protests near the beginning of the movie, are not that different to someone who is not that good at music. Later, he says he only makes music so that “when the geniuses come, they will have something to work with.”

At 70, Zé is still very restless and you’re continually wondering what he’ll do or say next, which pretty much simulates the curiosity that clearly courses through his own mind. It’s an inspiring and thought-provoking film, and if it comes to the proverbial theatre near you, jump on it.