A great album which provided many of the tunes with single-syllable titles (“Hein”, “Toc”, etc…) that North American fans may be familiar with from the Luaka Bop collections. This includes many of his best collaborations with guitarist Vincente Barreto — quirky, clockwork-y arrangements and endless plays on words and sound. It’s worth picking up the whole record, because now you can hear how it was meant to sound as a whole, and also because the material which was omitted from the Luaka collections is pretty good (including Ze’s version of the lovely Jobim/De Moraes bossa nova standard, “A Felicidade”). – slipcue.com 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.” Zé was born in the Bahia hinterlands. The strongest musical references of his childhood were the cocos by Jackson do Pandeiro, the forros by Luiz Gonzaga, the local folklore, the traditional Afro-Brazilian sambas de roda, and violeiros’ cantigas, together with the mass idols broadcast by the omnipresent Rádio Nacional (only after 1949, when electricity arrived there). In 1951, he was already in Salvador. A bad student, he discovered a great inspiration in the arid Os Sertões (Euclides da Cunha), the coverage of the battle of Canudos that brought a detailed description of his Northeastern peers. Later, he joined the CPC, a popular culture center that acted as a cultural resistance organization during the military dictatorship, researched folklore, and producing culture based on the findings. After some partnerships with the poet José Carlos Capinam for folkloric dances like bumba-meu-boi and chegança, he was criticized by CPC members for becoming repetitive. He hadn’t accepted the criticism (“folklore is always the same”), but he enrolled at the Music College of Bahia. After a basic course to learn the rudiments of written music, he studied with such luminaries as H.J. Koellreuter (music history), Piero Bastianelli, Walter Smetak (violincello), Aida Zolinger (piano), Edy Cajueiro (violão), Ernst Widmer (composition), Yulo Brandão (counterpoint), Jamari Oliveira (harmony), Lindembergue Cardoso (instrumentation), and Sérgio Magnani (orchestration).