The Hips of Tradition: The Return of Tom Zé (Brazil 5)

We’re re-releasing two of Tom Zé’s albums—thirty years after they first came out!—both chock full of avant garde pop hits ready to be discovered and exalted by the mainstream. 

On both The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits (Brazil Classics 4)—compiled by the guy who’s great idea this record label was, David Byrne—and The Hips of Tradition: The Return of Tom Zé (Brazil 5), here’s what you have in store:

Household appliances and tools in arrangements with horns, strings, “prepared” guitars (punctuated by grunts, screams and other wild percussion), all melded with eccentric metaphorical lyricism. The result: sounds of “sambas and archangels / street and street riot,” sometimes hypnotic, sometimes dissonant and always a beautiful amalgamation of unusual noises, hysterical lyrics, and pop songs that remain an essential part of the Brazilian historical legacy of musical exploration.

The 30th anniversary edition of The Hips of Tradition: The Return of Tom Zé (Brazil 5) comes in a gatefold jacket, either in unlimited black vinyl or in a limited Amazon Green.

"Tom Zé's original title for this album was Ancas, the Portuguese word for hips. "Hips" is hip here because of the immediate association with movement of the body -dance- even if the music might seem more heady than anything else. But there's more to this anca business. The word may have come to the Portuguese through Provençal, the language of the medieval troubadours who enchanted ladies and admirers with the fine art of song.

And what better way to think of Tom Zé than as a (post-) modern troubadour of the electronic age, inventing and blending motz e som (words and sound, in Provençal) as the elegant Brazilian concrete poet and critic Augusto de Campos saw some 20 years ago (here the echo is brightest in "Feira de Santana"). In the 1970s, Tom Zé recorded on a label called Continental, whose beyond-Brazil overtones become even more relevant in listening to this outside urban outbacker who tosses some needed perplexity into the ring of Brazilian music.

Zé was a studied poet of song in the 70's; he experimented with decomposition, groaned satires and pursued "serious" metaphor-laden material. No reason to believe any of that has changed. Here you can hear the against-the-grain "Suffer From Youth," and sense the surprise without knowing the native language. Tom Zé makes it strange for Brazilians , too. His colorful, oddball, offbeat words simply make you wonder. And even the noise is nice where polyvalent play- polyrhythms, polyphony and polysemic approaches to performance- abound. These bits and pieces, compositions, songs and soundings probe tradition, diction, arrangement and derangement. Settle in to be unsettled, again."