Stray Dog in the Milky Way: Tom Zé (b. 1936) and Brazilian Popular Music

FAIN: FEL-267905-20

Christopher Dunn
Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)

Research and writing leading to a biography of Brazilian folk musician Tom Zé (1936- ).

The personal and artistic trajectory of Tom Zé (b. 1936), one of the great musical innovators of our time, reveals a larger portrait of modern Brazil during the last century. His life and art provide a microhistorical prism through which to examine modernization and underdevelopment, rural to urban migration, authoritarian rule and its legacies, inequality under neo-liberal regimes, insurgent social movements, and cultural globalization. His work also provides an exquisite example of the creative repurposing of cultural tradition, identified with rural northeastern Brazil, in dialogue with experimental music and poetics.

Associated Products

"Cultural Activism, Avantgarde, and Popular Music in Bahia: The Education of Tom Zé." (Article)
Title: "Cultural Activism, Avantgarde, and Popular Music in Bahia: The Education of Tom Zé."
Author: Christopher Dunn
Abstract: This article considers the education of Brazilian musician Tom Zé, who gained national visibility as a participant in the late sixties Tropicália movement along with a cohort of young artists from Bahia known as the grupo baiano. I focus on the period between 1960, when he relocated from his hometown, Irará, to the capital in Salvador, until his departure for São Paulo in 1968 to participate in the tropicalist movement. His formative experience in Salvador introduced him to left-wing cultural activism, the musical avantgarde, and a vibrant popular music scene inspired largely by bossa nova. Within this milieu, he developed his own approach to popular music inspired by the cantoria tradition of the rural Northeast together with experimental techniques he learned at the university.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/brasilbrazil
Access Model: Open
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Brasil/Brazil
Publisher: Brasil/Brazil

Tom Zé’s Irará Memory and Revelation in the Brazilian Sertão (Article)
Title: Tom Zé’s Irará Memory and Revelation in the Brazilian Sertão
Author: Christopher Dunn
Abstract: This article considers the work of musician Tom Zé (Antonio José Santana Martins, b. 1936), who rose to prominence in 1968 as a participant of the multidisciplinary movement, Tropicália, together with several other artists from the state of Bahia. I focus on his early life in Irará, a small town on the edge of the northeastern sertão, his early experiments as a singer-songwriter, and his later evocations of his place of origin based on an idea of temporal disjunction in relation to modern coastal Brazil. I discuss how Tom Zé engaged the popular northeastern song tradition of cantoria as well as canonical texts about the region, such as Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões. Finally, I consider his concept album, Tropicália lixo lógico (2012), which proposes a novel theory of Tropicália based on the encounter between modern urban Brazil and the sertão, imagined as a temporal vestige of medieval Mozarab Iberia.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://uwpress.wisc.edu/journals/journals/lbr.html
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Publisher: Luso-Brazilian Review

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