Brazil Music

The Father Of Invention TOM ZÉ

Tom Zé began his career together with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Maria Bethânia. As a composer, he influenced Caetano and many others and delivered an expressive body of work through his own discography. A restless thinker, he was adept at modern erudite music experimentations, yet he was always ignored by both industry and audiences until he was discovered by David Byrne. He can be better understood through his self-coined definition: "I don't make art, I make spoken and sung journalism."

In 1989 while visiting Brazil, David Byrne found a used copy of Estudando o Samba, which he took as a didactic work. When he listened to the album, he was immediately taken by Zé's sound and called Arto Lindsay, who gave him what information he had about Zé. When a Brazilian journalist from a renowned newspaper interviewed Byrne, he saw a note on his desk, "When in Brazil, look for Tom Zé." He reported that and Zé was alerted. Radiant, he phoned Caetano for more information and Caetano replied that the attention wasn't about him, but rather Tuzé de Abreu, Byrne's friend -- which prompted a certain level of reserve by Zé in subsequent interviews. However, Byrne did sign Zé as the first artist of his Luaka Bop label. His releases there would get favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Le Monde, and win a Creativity Award in Telluride, CO. In 1991, his album The Best of Tom Zé was voted the third best album by critics and fourth by the readers of Down Beat. In 1992, he recorded The Hips of Tradition (also on Luaka Bop) and participated in the Zurich Jazz Festival in Switzerland. He then departed for a successful series of tours in Europe and the U.S. He is the first Brazilian musician to be presented at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1993), and the first Latin American composer to be presented at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. He also opened a concert at the London International Festival of Theatre at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, England. He appeared in concert and at festivals in Canada (Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton, Saskatoon) and New York, and received 20th Century Artist honors and performed at Summerstage in New York's Central Park.