Tom Zé

Antonio Jose Santana Martins was born, as he likes to say, 500 years ago in the little town of Irara in the province of Bahia, which is 1936 for everyone else. The son of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Bobby Lapointe's younger brother, Frank Zappa's cousin, Albert Marcoeur's father (a French musician from the late 70s), Beck's granddad and "tropicalist" army buddy of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Gal Costa, all spiritual ties, very spiritual. Tom Zé is a little like them, but at the same time nothing, and no-one, is like him. Naturally against the tide, when Brazilian television in the 60s invited him to take the "Trampoline to success", he wrote a song for the show called "Staircase to failure". The rest was in keeping. When his playmates discovered the rich delight in the large string ensembles, Antonio José Santana Martins would be bowled over listening to a floorboard sander, its sound going wonderfully well with his militant monosyllabic songs. His love of strange sounds led him to make a home-made instrument in which the keys are replaced by bells and the strings by mixers, typewriters and other implements which his peers would have rather seen at the back of a garage than on stage. Not surprisingly, it was amongst the grease and ball bearings of his cousin's service station that Tom Ze, fed up and worn out, was preparing to bury his career in 1989. But he had not reckoned with the timely arrival of David Byrne who, coming upon one of his old albums by chance, was taken by its strange beauty and stepped in front of the garage door. The boss of Luaka Bop got back the old recordings made by the Brazilian Zebedee and relauched his career. A 'best of' came out in 90 and a new album "Hips of tradition" was released in 92, both impossible to find today. That was the year of Tom Ze's invitation to try his tasty "Com defeito de fabricaçao" in which Tom Zé develops his theory of "aesthetic plagiarism", a true profession of faith for a wonderful dealer of second-hand sounds. And his whole family got to its feet to applaud. His grandchildren with Sean Lennon, Tortoise and Stereolab in front, had prepared an album of remixes for him, "Postmodern Platos", a good way to start the last year of the millennium.
With "Jogos de Armar" in 2000 he went back to the repertory and above all the fantastic sonic machines he made at the end of the seventies. According to the precepts of antropophagism, he recycled numerous elements, music, literature, history, of the North-East Brazilian culture, mixing them with his wild imagination. In 2002 "Jogos de Armar" and its auxiliary record containing ready-to-use samples, was released in France with new packaging, the French public finally discovering the artist live during his concert/creation with young singers for the Banlieues Bleues festival.

Benjamin MiNiMuM