Tom Zé was born Antonio José Santana Martins, in the country town of Irará in the state of Bahia, Brazil in 1936. When he finished his elementary education in 1950, he left his family and moved to the city of Salvador as there were no high schools in his hometown. Here in the capital, Tom struggled to adjust to noisy, chaotic urban life and attended high school where he did not do well. But no matter. As he himself recalls, his real education took place behind the counter of his father’s shop which sold cheap textiles to the people who worked the land - the small farmers who owned small plantations of tobacco, beans and manioc. During a hiatus from school and bad marks, a friend played him a song on the guitar; the polyphonic sound hooked Tom. He bought a guitar and began to sing songs of prosaic streetlife and nostalgic pastoral paeans to Irará. Thus, his musical life began.

Tom Zé first appeared on TV in 1960 on a show called “Escada Para O Sucesso” (“Stairway to Success”). His contribution was a song parodying the name of the program with a composition called “Rampa Para O Fracasso” (“Ramp to Failure”), as well as others satirizing politics and the city. With this exposure, Tom was brought to the attention of a group of musicians who were working in Salvador at the time with whom he would eventually sing, play, and hang out and with whom he would form the Tropicalista circle. Following the success of a series of TV gigs, friends prodded Tom to enter the College of Music at the University of Bahia to develop his talents. Once at the University he pursued a classical course of study including composition, counterpoint, harmony, piano, guitar and his main instrument, the cello. None of this foreshadowed a future in which his orchestrations would include a blender, radio, water conduit, typewriter, floor polisher, tape recorders, keyboards, and speakers in a massive sound system he built and mounted in a wall unit.

By the time Tom Zé was studying for final exams for teacher certification in 1967 he had already developed a promising career in classical music. But Caetano Veloso, with whom he shared political and musical affinities, asked him if he wanted to go to São Paulo, so he packed his bags and he headed for the South. There a group of artists including Tom Zé, founded the Tropicalist Movement and Tom himself won many prizes, and appreciative recognition from the public and fellow musicians alike. He appeared in concerts with Caetano, Maria Bethania, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, and other Baianos, and became one of Tropicalismo’s most ironic and irreverent interpreters. At this point he began recording albums with others and in 1968 released his first solo work,Tom Zé , followed by Tom Zé in 1970, and yet another entitledTom Zé in 1972. In the early seventies, during the long night of right wing repression in Brazil, Tom Zé released Todos os Olhos (All the Eyes) the jacket art work of which included an in-your-face gesture to the censors: what appears to be a giant yellow eye with a gleaming iris, is in actuality an asshole set with a marble, shot in soft focus. In governmental innocence, the record was published and the artist had the last laugh.

By this release, Tom Zé was becoming increasingly interested in experimental music and, as a result, all but disappeared from the mainstream media’s eye and the public’s memory, though he has maintained a following on the college circuit. These experiments were published in the mid-seventies on several LPs: Estudando o Samba
(1976), Correio da Estação do Brás (1978), and Nave Maria, (1979).

Tom Zé now lives in the teeming urban chaos of São Paulo with his wife Neusa where he writes jingles for leftist politicians, creates poetic songs and letters, still makes music, and sometimes misses Irará.