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This is among our favorite Tom Ze albums. Richard Gehr who writes so much better then we had this to say about Tom You don't need to be a polymath to love Tom Zé's's music, but it helps. A seminal figure of the early-'70s Tropicalismo movement in Brazil that launched the careers of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes, among others, Zé's is a card-carrying cultural cannibal inspired equally by both ideas and sounds. InchI don't make art,Inch he has said. InchI make spoken or sung journalism.Inch By way of explaining his unique outsider status in Brazilian popular music for National Public Radio, Zé recalled how he Inchdiscovered at a young age that I was horrible composer, a horrible instrumentalist, and a horrible singer.Inch Like Lee Perry, George Clinton, Kip Hanrahan and Hal Willner, Zé is a genre unto himself, an uncompromising ringmaster with a talent for marshaling mighty forces to manifest his idiosyncratic musical visions. Born Antonio José Santana Martins in the outback village of Irara, Bahia, in 1936, Tom Zé was a semipopular singer-songwriter from his eponymous debut album in 1968 through the '70s. By the end of the '80s, however, a discouraged Zé was on the verge of abandoning music completely. In fact, he was on the verge of assuming management of a gas station with his wife when he learned that David Byrne wanted to meet him. Drawn to it's barbed-wire cover illustration, Byrne had picked up a copy of Zé's 1975 album Estudando o Samba (Studying Samba) while visiting Brazil, and wanted to meet it's maker. The following Luaka Bop releases of Tom's music revitalized his career, nowhere more so then in Brazil. Tom's third Luaka Bop album, Com Defeito de Fabricao (Fabrication Defect), is Zé's most fully realized so far. It consists of fourteen Inchdefects,Inch tracks Zé's composed through his Inchesthetics of plagiarism,Inch or arrasto, which he def
