Customer Reviews

Estudando O Pagode - Na Opereta Segregamulher E Amor

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tom Ze has lost none of his lively sense of fun over the years. Each track beautifully crafted and full of interest. The bold experimentation with layers of sound combined with traditional forms makes the album sound fresh each time I listen - which is often!

I disagree with the reviewers who state this CD is not a good place to start your Tom Ze collection. I enjoy it more than his earlier recordings, which are also great. "Pagode" is gorgeous, profound and accessible. It's wonderfully avant-garde pop that you can totally shake your bootie to. In fact, that's all i've done since purchasing this disc. FANTASTIC and deeply satisfying. And what a great theme for an Operetta! Wonderful booklet, too--I just wish i could read Portuguese. Mr. Ze easily earns every star available.

Tom Ze, comp, arr, voc, b guit, ficus leaf, whistle; Jair Oliveira, arr, guit, b guit, b, programming, voc; others, voc, misc instruments, incl. percussion.

This is only the second album by Tom Ze' that I have bought so I can hardly claim to be an expert on the music of this prodigiously talented and extraordinarily quirky musician. Ze' has been around since the `60s, when he emerged as one of the founders of Tropicalia, an art and music movement in Brazil that merged art and political expression. Ze's infectious songs hark back to the great days of bossa nova and giants like Jobim and Gilberto. (He even quotes them in his songs.) But his music affiliates just as strongly with rock and with hip hop as it does with samba, whether old or new (or new new). Ze' is the Tom Waits of nova bossa nova, like a Brazilian Michael Franti from the San Francisco based hip hop group, Spearhead. Whatever its resonances, the music Ze' has produced on this album (which was nominated for a Latin Grammy) is both consistently lyrical and intensely rhythmical. (Both are characteristics of the classic bossa nova that preceded and inspired him.)

Estudando o Pagode is a rock-bossa opera-in-process (Ze' hadn't completed it at the time of recording), its theme the systematic persecution and marginalization of women. Freedom to love as one wishes without domination is a persistent theme --one of the prettiest songs on the album, "Elau," is an exchange between two gays at a Gay-Lesbian parade at the Vatican. In "Para La do Para (Out There by Para)", Tom (playing the role of a woman) sings: "What you think/ I know that you think/ That a woman doesn't think/ But she does // What you want/ I know what you want/ That a woman doesn't want/ But she does....."

That's pretty much the message of this intriguing opera: we're all equal, we all think, we all want, men and women both. It is delivered in language that hover between surreal and Da Da-ist, not surprising given Ze's aspiration to poetizing.

But the message is so artfully presented in this delightful work that it comes across to the listener first as music, not propaganda or argument. And of course, since it's sung in Portuguese, the words are largely irrelevant to the listener until the listener has read the libretto. This is just very good pop music by a great musician who also has a great heart.

After watching a movie at the San Francisco Film Festivel several years back about Tom Ze, I was tempted to buy this and other CD's - phenomenal.

I'm constantly asking myself about "melody": what the word actually means, how important "melody" is to the success of a work. Things like that. And...well...I'm going to keep asking the questions; they aren't going to be resolved here! But - one thing I could perhaps mention, when discussing the difference between GOOD Tom Zé and GREAT Tom Zé, is the presence or absence of a strong MELODIC profile. Less present here then in some others of his works. And, anyway, TZ isn't the great MELODIST of Brazilian Music in any case. But still...I love the textures, harmonies and rhythms of this piece: classic later - period TZ. His comeback delights me - there's hope for us all! But...this isn't his best work. Maybe, if I wanted to make analogies, I could say this is his Motor - Booty Affair to Jogos Da Armar's Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome. Those references might be a little too inside for some...George Clinton, yo! Is TZ the George Clinton of Brazilian Music? Ô Analogies! Love 'em, Hate 'em, Can't Live Without 'em!!! Anyway, you will enjoy this disc, if indeed you enjoy left - of -center Brazilian Groove Music. But there are a few things you should really own before you pick up this one.

The Tropicalia movement consisted of a group of inconoclasts who took bossa nova and samba, deconstructed them, then put them back together, and in the process indulged in psychedelics, so what came out became a heady mixture of Beatles inflected Brazilian music.

Tom Ze, an iconoclast's iconoclast, took things one step further and deconstructed the reconstructed Tropicalia and turned it into....well, Tom Ze....there's just no comparison, since his signature sound is just inimitable.

I'd have to agree with the reviewer here who says this is "not the place to start" if you're contemplating your first Tom Ze purchase. This CD, which is ostensibly an opera of sorts about the subjugation of women over the centuries, is indisputably his most inaccessible. It's got some highlights, but "Fabrication Defect", "Hips of Tradition", or "Jogos de Armar" are much more catchy and listenable as a whole.

Metacritic dotcom rates it as one of the top 2 cds so far this year (as of May 2006)

The current and official Tom Ze record of world events all summed up in a "PAGODE". An after-political-intrigue cocktail party for tails looking for cocks and cocks looking for tails and every other form of collusion and back-room, boardroom and even bathroom politicos with their secrets and lies and all disguised to look like a press-the-flesh / press-the-flush festival of Tom Ze-foolery ! Drink ! Dance ! Sing ! Samba ! Pagode ! Pagode ! and Pagode Again ! I adore this man tremendously !, so should you!