Tom Zé

From Irará in the Bahian backlands, Tom Zé arrived in Salvador to study composition and became the most formally experimental of the Tropicalists, treating the song as a machine to be taken apart. He contributed to the 1968 collective album and pursued a fractured, conceptual approach long after the movement dispersed. Rediscovered by international audiences decades later, he remains its most uncompromising avant-gardist.