SÉRIE DOIS MOMENTOS - VOL.15: "Estudando o Samba" e "Correio da Estação do Brás"

This is a unique opportunity: to hear the full version of the album that made David Byrne defy the darkness of an apparent curse and rescue Tom Zé to the world. And it is unlikely that anyone should be disappointed when traveling from the cover – with ropes and barbed wire intertwined under a big Samba sign - to the CD: Tom Zé’s creativity was peaking, and he was drawing incredibly new sounds from instruments as common as the acoustic guitar, cavaquinho and percussion, besides delivering top line poetry. The lessons with classical and vanguard masters in Salvador (Bahia) readied Tom Zé for higher grounds such as in Mã and Toc, with their orchestrated minimalism, apparently repetitive, monosyllabic, but organized in sound layers (including moans and typewriter noises), cleverly alternated –details that would make electronica producers drool. In Estudando o Samba, one of his most impressive versions can be found: A Felicidade, by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, with voice and (acoustic) guitar more confusing than João Gilberto could ever figure. Even the sambas in the album are more falsely naive than usual. Tô, written with Elton Medeiros, sums up the prevailing philosophy: "I am explaining just to confuse you/ I am confusing you just to make things clear". If compared to Estudando, Correio da Estação do Brás can even be regarded as a conventional disc, nonetheless proving its importance as a beautiful report on the lives of northeastern immigrants in São Paulo (as Zé himself). It features the title track (which was recycled as Feira de Santana in the 1992 album, The Hips of Tradition), the curiously blatant Menina Jesus and O Pecado Original, as well as something as witty as the latter, called Rifa e Revista. After seriously studying the samba, Tom Zé felt at ease to criticize it in Correio: Lá Vem a Cuíca and Na Parada de Sucesso (written with Vicente Barreto) are two nice strokes on the commercialization of the genre.(Silvio Essinger)