Tom Zé – The Hips of Tradition

Introduction: this Tom Zé’s album is a very special one. Why? For many reasons – which a simple listening makes you understand immediately – and also because it signalled the return of the old ‘tropicalista’ after a long and almost fatal absence on the music world. David Byrne’s label (Luaka Bop) released the album in 1992, in a period when the former Talking Heads’ member was totally in love with the Brazilian sounds (specially with the ‘tropicalista’ period, with names such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, Os Mutantes and, of course, Tom Zé). This is the fifth CD that Luaka Bop produced to introduce to a vast public the fascinating Brazilian popular music of the last decades of the 20th century. 

Introduction note about Tom Zé: Tom Zé was a top figure of the tropicalista period, companion and partner of the great names of that period (that are more than the above mentioned), creator of that revolutionary aesthetics and, therefore, an inescapable name of the Brazilian song. However, for more than two decades, he disappeared from the spotlights, from the stages, from the recordings, from everyone’s sight in the world and unfortunately was forgotten. It was David Byrne who brought him again to the limelight (well, the expression is too deceiving to be here) because he got some of the old Lps of Tom Zé by chance on an old shop in São Paulo. He didn’t know him, he listened to them and fell in love with them. In such a way that he looked for Tom Zé (that at that time worked in a gas station) and invited him to record for his label. 

Tom Zé has few CDs. However, some of his CDs deserve not to be forgotten and therefore I mention them here, not only because of their enormous quality and creativity, but also because they are rare masterpieces, hard to find, even in his own country: 

Tom Zé – Tom Zé (1968)
Tom Zé – Se O Caso É Chorar (1972) (If The Case Is Crying)
Tom Zé – Todos Os Olhos (1973) (Every Eyes)
Tom Zé – Estudando O Samba (1975) (Studying Samba)
Tom Zé – Correio Da Estação Do Brás (1978) (Brás Station’s Mail)
Tom Zé – The Hips Of Tradition (1992)
Tom Zé – Com Defeito De Fabricação (1998) (Manufacture Default)
Tom Zé – Jogos De Armar (2000) (Lying Games)

This album is peculiar, like many others from Tom Zé. Mixing samba and baião, forró and popular songs (although this traditional styles are transformed into something else by the Tom Zé’s tropicalista sense), The Hips of Tradition is, in the whole, an impossible-to-classify album. It is the child of an enormous creativity and of the continuous search for out-of-the-box elements, extraordinary solutions and the melodic-not-melodic element in his songs. It is the fruit of the great irony that always characterised Tom Zé and is expressed in many of his songs (translated into English in this edition because of market logic) and, in the end, it is an absolutely uncommon album. 

The first song in the album, “Ogodô, Year 2000”, is the most unusual, bearing in mind all the previous work of the artist. It is a frenetic samba, characterised by a strong and repeated rhythm; the lyrics plays with the repetition of sounds in order to fit the rhythm in the song’s frame. In fact, you just can’t get it out of your head…
Then there is one of the high moments of the album. The song “Sem a Letra A” (Without the Letter «A») is extremely melodic, a hymn for your senses, composed for a children’s play by Elifas Andreato — “Sem você não «A»” (…), in which the letter «A» vanishes from the alphabet. It is one of the few Tom Zé’s songs made in a traditional way, without any interruptions or drastic changes. 

The album includes not only strange songs, but also some more traditionally composed; some of them are inspired by writers like William Faulkner and Guimarães Rosa (a worldwide know Brazilian writer) — for instances, Feira de Santana; the song Taí, There It Is, is a reworking of an ond hit by Joubert de Carvalho; in O amor é Velho-Menina (Love is an Old Little Girl), he reinvents sound dreams; in the song Tatuarambá), Tom Zé adapts the Concrete poetry of Haroldo de Campos — an important Brazilian Modernist poet —; in another song (Mutiplicar-se Única, Multiply Into One) he uses Cantor’s modern mathematics and Don Quixote’s paradoxes; the last song is one of the most beautiful songs of all times — it is intitled Amar (To Love), inspired in the love of Aeneas to Dido. 

The 18 songs of Hips of Tradition (four of them small, strange and dissonant instrumental interludes of less than a minute each) sign the coming back of Tom Zé to the world of living people — since that is that all this is about: life in form of song.