Tom Zé

Bahia to Sao Paulo

Tom Zé was born Antonio Jose Santana Martins on October 11, 1936 in the Bahian sertao, and as a child was influenced by Luiz Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro on the radio. From 1964 he studied at the Music School of the Federal University of Bahia, with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, Ernst Widmer and Walter Smetak. In 1965 he performed in Augusto Boal's Arena canta Bahia in Sao Paulo alongside Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Maria Bethania. Veloso invited him to Sao Paulo in 1968, he appeared on Tropicalia ou Panis et Circencis, and won first place at the IV Festival de Musica Popular Brasileira on TV Record with "Sao Paulo, Meu Amor". His debut album, Grande Liquidacao, followed in 1968.

In the 1970s the military crackdown on the Tropicalistas pushed him out of the public eye and his records sold poorly; Red Bull Music Academy says David Byrne found him working at a relative's gas station in the 1980s. Byrne bought Estudando o Samba (1976, Continental) while researching samba for Luaka Bop, and Zé became the label's first signed artist, on Brazil Classics 4 (1990). His style is experimental and Dada-influenced, working with the concrete poets, including Augusto de Campos, and using objects as instruments, a typewriter and an industrial floor polisher. Later albums include Parabelo (1997, a score for the Grupo Corpo ballet), Com Defeito de Fabricacao (1998, named one of the New York Times's ten best albums of the year), Estudando o Pagode (2005), Tropicalia Lixo Logico (2012) and Lingua Brasileira (2022); the documentary Fabricando Tom Ze appeared in 2006, and he took a seat at the Academia Paulista de Letras in 2022.