***Tom Ze - Grande Liquidacao -Fantastic Eccentric Tropicalia! (Brazil)***

Tom Zé (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈtõ ˈzɛ]; born Antônio José Santana Martins, 11 October 1936 in Irará, Bahia, Brazil) is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who was influential in the Tropicália movement of 1960s Brazil. After the peak of the Tropicália period, Zé went into relative obscurity: it was only in the 1990s, when the musician and label head David Byrne discovered an album recorded by Zé many years earlier, that he returned to performing and releasing new material.

In 1968 Tom Ze moved from Salvador, Bahia to Sao Paulo where he hung out and wrote with his friends Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. Although initially part of the Tropicalia movement, Ze was extremely independent and determined to forge his own musical path. He started by recording Grande Liquidacao, a hyperactive pop album backed up by two incredible psychedelic rock bands: Os Brazoes and Os Versateis.

Tom Ze's material on this album includes traditional Brazilian Tropicalia laced with crazy vocal melodies and samples a multitude of genres from funk to psychedelic rock and bossa nova creating, in the process, a sort of unheard pop exotica. This is especially apparent on the track Gloria with its changing tempos, bubbling instrumentation and off-the-wall harmonies. The pace of the album, considering it was the 60s, is brutal, so Ze takes a break between songs to address the listener before resuming his zigzag trajectory. The album here also includes the fantastic Parque Industrial which was later recorded by Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso on the Tropicalia: Panis et Circenses album.

Style

Remaining true to the experimental and Dada impulses of Tropicália, Zé has been noted for both his unorthodox approach to melody and instrumentation, employing various objects as instruments such as the typewriter.[5] He has collaborated with many of the concrete poets of São Paulo, including Augusto de Campos, and employed concrete techniques in his lyrics. Musically, his work appropriates samba, Bossa Nova, Brazilian folk music, forró, and American rock and roll, among others. He has been praised by avant-garde composers for his use of dissonance, polytonality, and unusual time signatures. Because of the experimental nature of many of his compositions, Zé has been compared with American musicians such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.[6]

One of his last efforts, though, has been a return to Bossa Nova, his Estudando a Bossa - Nordeste Plaza. Says Zé: “That music has inhabited my psyche for 50 to 60 years. Familiar and profound, yet somehow extraterrestrial in my mind. It had to come out, to be dealt with.