Tom Zé

Yeah, it's culminating over a decade of careful preservation efforts.

Then moving to Brazil, Folha de São Paulo is celebrating the 90th birthday of music legend Tom Zé, and he gave an interview casually referring to himself as a sertanejo dodecaphonist.

[laughs] Which is just an amazing description.

It really is, blending rural Brazilian folk music with the strict mathematical 12-tone composition of classical music.

"É proibido proibir," right? It's prohibited to prohibit.

But basically, what happened with Os Mutantes is Os Mutantes was like a zombie rock group, and they hook up with Caetano, Gil, um, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Maria Bethania, Rogerio Duprat, right? They hook up, and they, like, form the nexus of this, like, Tropicalismo, Tropicalia movement.

But that, like, moment was like he stopped caring about appeasing anybody.

Like, they were very, um, aggressive in mixing what shouldn't have been mixed, and just a couple years before that, a whole bunch of people, like, marched in the street to protest rock and roll from the left.

Yeah, so another good piece of context for listeners I think to get a sense of Caetano's early work is that album as well as his, kinda he has a trilogy of self-titled albums.

Yeah.

And that album features Tom Zé.

Tom Zé.