¿Do you know Tom Ze?

                                             
This is Tom Ze, a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Brazil. He`s 80 years old, and began his career together with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethania, when all of they were very young and fast unknown. Into his musical references we can find the local folklore and the traditional afro-brazilian sambas, among others. He participated in a series of concerts with this musicians and the "Tropicalia movement" from Brazil.
In the 60`s, he joined a popular culture center that acted as a cultural resistance organization during the military dictatorship. Later he moved out of the plublic eye and began a period of experimentations with "hybrid" instruments, new composition styles, music full of irony, and some erudite music references. Due this strange music experimentations, he was always ignored by the industry and the audiences. Tom was so depressed at this time, that he decided to leave the music and return to his small hometown to work in a gas station, but In 1989 he was re-discovered by David Byrne. While visiting Brazil, David Byrne found a used copy of "Estudando o Samba" and he became amazed whith Tom Ze´s work. That was the beginning of a new career for Tom: Byrne did sign Tom as the first artist of his "Luaka Bop" record label. I knew Tom Ze in a documentary called "Fabricando e Tom Ze", I enjoy his work a lot and I think that he´s like a kind of brazilian "Florcita Motuda" (or Motuda a kind of chilenian "Tom Ze").