Tom Zé

Grande Liquidação is the first album by Tom Zé, released in Brazil in 1968, the year he began to appear in television song festivals. It is a concept record about São Paulo, the city where he had just settled: twelve short, satirical songs about advertising, consumer goods, good manners and the frantic pace of an expanding metropolis. Many of the habits of his later work are already in place here.

Born in Irará, in the interior of Bahia, Zé studied music at the Federal University of Bahia, where the avant-garde was part of the teaching, before moving south. The album came out on the Artistas Unidos imprint of Rozenblit, the record company based in Recife. It was produced by João Araujo, with arrangements by Damiano Cozzella and Sandino Hohagen. Two groups back him: Os Brazões on a pair of songs, and Os Versáteis on most of the others.

The record opens with São São Paulo, the song that won the fourth TV Record festival of Brazilian popular music in 1968. Its lyric pictures eight million people who attack each other politely, love with hatred and hate with love. Curso Intensivo de Boas Maneiras mocks the etiquette lessons that Marcelino de Carvalho gave on television. Glória, a jab at family values, keeps changing tempo under off-kilter harmonies. Throughout, the electric guitar and organ of Jovem Guarda pop meet Brazilian rhythms, marching band arrangements and ideas borrowed from the European avant-garde.

Zé wrote the sleeve notes himself, and they set out the theme bluntly: somos um povo infeliz, bombardeado pela felicidade, a people made unhappy by being bombarded with happiness. That same year Parque Industrial was recorded by Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso for the collective manifesto Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis. The original LP later became hard to find. Reviewing this reissue in Songlines in 2011, Peter Culshaw heard "a kind of wonder and freshness" and suggested the album was "a few decades ahead of its time". Wider recognition came only decades later, when David Byrne began releasing Zé's music on his Luaka Bop label.

This is the CD edition on Mr Bongo, catalogue number MRBCD075, first issued in 2011 and remastered from the original Rozenblit master tapes and licensed from Polydisc of Recife and Rozenblit.