Thursday, May 15, 2008
Why Beck, Stereolab, Tortoise, the High Llamas and Sean Lennon are all fascinated by Tom Zi.
May 26, 1999 | Tom Zi's eyes are large and dark, a pair of polished acorns. He is 62 years old, which you wouldn't know but you can actually kind of tell when you stare at the creases. He smiles a lot, like he's always laughing at his own absurdist in-joke. Sometimes, when he looks at you, his pupils are so bright that you can see a ghost of yourself. Other times he drops his head to consider a question. His features -- the patchy beard, big nose, diminutive frame -- are strikingly human. His eyes never wander.
His attention is remarkable. There are a million things happening at once in this shabby Victorian parlor, downstairs in the Irving Plaza concert hall. Later tonight, Zi is performing a rare U.S. show with the Chicago post-rock band Tortoise. Right now, the room is loud and complicated with the kinds of things that have to happen before concerts. A small television crew is interviewing David Byrne about Zi (pronounced Zay), whom the former Talking Head tracked down more than 10 years ago in Brazil. A photographer from a Brazilian newspaper is pacing impatiently, waiting for a chance to take Zi outside in the rain. And a stressed-out record company guy keeps coming into the room and looking over the translator's shoulder. There are things to do. Sound checks. Photographs. Brazilians who need nonexistent tickets. Dinner. Strangers to hug. And Zi's eyes never wander.
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Tom Zi, who has made some of the most beautiful music in the world, is not a purist. Purists are boring, especially world music purists. The best contemporary musicians know this. That is why artists like Beck, Stereolab, Tortoise, the High Llamas and Sean Lennon are all fascinated by Tom Zi and Tropicalia, the 1960s Brazilian pop movement that he helped create. Beck et al. have looked beyond American-Anglo pop for inspiration and incorporated elements into their own work. They, like Zi, are not purists either.
If world beat is a genre of music loosely based on the idea of marrying native sounds with foreign influences or musics from other cultures, Zi made world beat music long before it went Deep Forest. In some ways, the Tropicalistas -- including principally Zi, the young Gilberto Gil, songwriter Caetano Veloso and a strange, obscure and wonderful band called Os Mutantes -- can be understood as corollaries to the dirty hippies jamming psychedelic music in the States. The Tropicalistas' movement was both political and social, set against injustice, restrictive sexuality and a military dictatorship. (Imagine Nixon's tenure, under martial law.)
"We speak about the government, the people that conspire with the government, the big corporations," says Zi, half in English, half with the help of a Portuguese translator. "If you live in a country like that, you have politics everywhere. You can't imagine."
Working with Brazil's rich rhythmic heritage -- dense with the music of Portugal, the Caribbean, Africa and indigenous America -- the Tropicalistas layered their pop songs with Brit psych, modernist poetry, found sounds and phrases ripped off wholesale from the Beatles and the Stones. Like most musicians, they were combining influences and reinventing in their own language. At the same time, there was never a question of where the components originated. Listen to the old Tropicalia records and you hear parts connected to parts connected to parts. It's some of the most angular, confusing and ecstatic pop music ever recorded.
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Oddly enough, it's the riff from "Smoke on the Water" coming through the P.A. onstage at Irving Plaza. Zi turns to the guitarist and stops the set. There is something that he wants to say to the audience.
"I want to make a partnership with you," he says, "to take plagiarism into your home."
It is difficult to understand Zi because his English is so poor. He's trying to convince the crowd that the melody of "Hey Jude" is almost the same as the Brazilian national anthem. He has split the audience into halves and has them humming each song separately at the same time. It's hard to know what he's talking about.
For Zi, plagiarism is political. A liner-note essay from his 1998 record "Fabrication Defect" explains how the third world can cannibalize the first, settle a score and put an end to the notion of the traditional composer. "The esthetic of the fabrication defect will reutilize the sonorous civilized trash ... It will recycle an alphabet of emotions contained in songs and musical symbols of the first world, that sealed each marked step of our affective and emotional life. They will be put to use in small cells of plagiarized material. This deliberate practice unleashes an esthetic of plagiarism ... that ambushes the universe of well-known and traditional music."
Back onstage, the guitarist rips into "Smoke on the Water" again. Conga drums come in. He switches to the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Zi smiles. The music wanders everywhere, but he is unswerving.
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