"I don't make art, I make spoken and sung journalism."
Tom's been making this unusually compelling type of journalism for decades, and though the work hasn't always been pop-chart-popular, he's managed to build an impressive catalog, and in the process influence scores of other artists.
When David Byrne visited Brazil in 1989, he bought Estudando o Samba, and then sought everything by Zé he could find. The two met, and eventually Zé became the first artist signed to Byrne's Luaka Bop Records.
Zé once described his artistic mission this way: "I remember seeing at the Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1969 an artwork representing a broken frame. That same year, in a soccer game, a player named Cesar de Palmeiras celebrated a goal with the fans instead of his team members. That had never happened before. Those two things inspired me, and a lot of my work tries to reproduce that discovery: Breaking the frame."
