Tom Zé at Mitaka Hikari No Hall, October 31st 2019

It’s unfair to bundle all the names of the immensely talented artists considered as Tropicalistas into one group. We’re talking about individuals with specific sensibilities and styles. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes and of course Tom Zé, not only changed Brazilian music forever, they had a lasting impact in popular music period. There’s no question, though, that the artistic movement in the late sixties in Brazil was unprecedented. Music, theater, painting, cinema, in all these disciplines artists from this Latin American country explored alternative venues of creation that would not only express their reality but will also question conservative views of art and beauty.

In this regard I’d say that Glauber Rocha was one of the most eloquent. He was a filmmaker, founder of the Cinema Novo (New Cinema) movement, but he was also an art theorist and wrote the Aesthetics of Hunger. In that essay he defines hunger as the essence of the Latin American tragedy. A hunger misunderstood as an exotic circumstance by the developed world and as a source of shame by Latin America itself. For Rocha embracing it in its ugliness and violence as a mean to make both the colonized and the colonizer aware of society’s injustices and at the same time to bring dignity and a unique artistic identity to the exploited, were his goals. 

To me Tom Zé is the Glauber Rocha of music and vice versa. Since I discovered him in the late nineties during his David Byrne revival (Byrne singed him to his label Luaka Bop after randomly buying Estudando o Samba in a record shop in Sao Paulo and being shocked by its content afterwards) I found his unique approach appealing. Contradiction as conflict is his modus operandi as well as the disruption of joy in samba and melancholy in bossanova. Just the cover of the aforementioned album reflects these elements. In front of pristine white there’s some rope and barbed wire. A juxtaposition of serenity and violence.

But this show, his first ever in Japan, started with absolute serenity. Without any kind of bells and whistles Tom Zé just casually walked onto the stage sporting a red leather trench coat and introduced each member of his band one by one. Some like Jarbas Mariz on mandolin and second vocals, Cristina Carneiro on keyboards and Daniel Maia on guitar have been with him for a long time. Felipe Alves on bass and Fábio Alves on drums are more recent additions. Each musician was essential to the presentation, enhancing the maestro vocals and providing a solid musical backup. They also took part in the theatrical aspects of the show and stage banter. 

The opening tune, Nave Maria, introduced the paradoxical elements described above referring to the sordid and yet transcendent experience of childbirth. He played a song from his 2014 album Vira Lata na Via Láctea, the political manifesto Esquerda, Grana e Direita, which included Mariz quoting Brazilian educator and author Paulo Freire in a spoken word fragment. Two songs from Estudando o Samba followed, Doi and Tô, with the latter containing one of Zé’s most famous aphorisms: “I’m explaining things to confuse you and I’m confusing you to make things clear”.

In between songs, and especially after Tô, you could tell he was becoming a bit frustrated for not being able to communicate directly to the audience his intentions, even though a translation of his lyrics was projected on a big screen behind. None of the band members could speak English or much less Japanese to help him in that department. This interaction between him and the spectators is an essential part of the show. Luckily a woman was able to translate the banter for the last third of the show. The whole thing turned into a recurrent funny bit in which Zé would send the interpreter off backstage and then remember something else and ask for her again. I think it was a sign of his ever creating mindset.

Things picked up steam with the rocking Ave Dor Maria and one of the best received ones Hein? (maybe because the similarities between it and the Japanese reaction for surprise え!) At this point he’d already ditched the trench coat and revealed a white outfit with a single red dot, as in the Japanese flag, over his heart. The theatrics in the following numbers included a fake guitar used as a prop, a suit to “honor the politicians in the White House” during the ironic Defeito 3: Politicar and a true jump scare (it was Halloween after all!) that involved the whole band in Brigitte Bardot.

For the last song of the show he invited the people in the audience to dance in the aisles and they complied. A large number of people stood and dance in the front while the forro Xiquexique was performed on stage by the whole band with Zé on guitar. It brought closure to the 85 minutes show that for me was a dream come true, I never expected to see this legend performing live. Zé covered almost every aspect of Brazilian culture, the saudade, the energy, the politics, the diversity, while questioning conventional and reductive notions of exoticism. Thank you Frue Japan for bringing this maestro, full of energy at 83, that is the embodiment of true Latin American excellence and artistry. 
  
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