Explaining Things So I Can Confuse You

In the mid 1980’s David Byrne pulled a Tom Zé album out of the samba section of a Rio de Janeiro record store. This purchase started a 25-year-long chain of events that has resulted in this box you now hold in your hands. That album, Estudando o Samba, was Tom’s study of the most prosaic of Brazilian musical styles. The original cover, with a coil of barbwire, had intrigued Byrne with its illogical imagery. The world of Tom Ze opened on that day, not only for those of us outside of Brazil, but also for those inside the country who had forgotten. Studies of Tom Zé: Explaining Things So I Can Confuse You collects for the first time Tom Zé’s ‘study’ records- the visionary Brazilian artist’s singular take on samba, pagode, And bossa nova. A retrospective nearly fifty years in the making.