Snapping the New York Times at a microphone creates a noise that goes fwaaap, but that's nothing compared to the metallic stutter you get by grinding your agogo bells against your welding tools. Of course, if you start doing that, you'd better wear protective goggles -- sparks shoot all over the stage. And if you're not careful, your newspaper could catch fire. Such are the occupational hazards of music-making for eccentric Brazilian composer Tom Ze, who's currently bending ears and opening eyes across North America as he beats his microphone with his hat.

Ze is a small, middle-aged man with short hair and a trim black beard. He speaks English tentatively, but like Italian comic Roberto Benigni, Ze's natural charm easily overcomes any language barrier. "People in America," he sang, holding aloft a compact disc in each hand, "buy this CD and I will grant you happiness." After the improvised sales jingle, Ze's voice bounced from child's squeak to strong tenor as he compulsively zipped and unzipped his revolving array of shirts and vests. Crouching and leaping, flailing with brio, Ze tirelessly flung his arms like a witch doctor.

And his avant-pop music is as spirited and idiosyncratic as his presence. Ze thought nothing of stopping a song dead to teach the audience how to sing along, and picking it up again once they'd learned their part. His band consisted of fellow Brazilian Jarbas Mariz on percussion and guitars, and members of the Chicago prog-rock band Tortoise on drums, bass, vibraphone, keyboards and percussion. Most songs were powered by angular staccato riffs on guitar and vibes (played by John McEntire with aggression and precision) over lightly percolating bossa nova and samba rhythms. On "Defect 6: Esteticar," the group exploded from quiet verse to wild chorus like they were a Brazilian Allman Brothers as the audience passionately sang along. On the instrumental "Toc," the group sounded like a samba school merging Steve Reich's minimalism with Varese's percussive masterwork Ionisation. Soon after, Ze and Mariz donned hardhats and stood very still as each knocked the other's head with a hammer. In rhythm, of course.

None of this sweaty musical scholarship is by accident. Like all intellectual eccentrics, Ze has developed a musical philosophy to undergird his experiments. His brilliant album on Luaka Bop, Fabrication Defect, contains a short essay on "The Esthetics of Plagiarism," which explains the concept of Arrastao, a method of stealing music, "that ambushes the universe of traditional music [with] unconventional instruments -- toys, whistles, saws and street noise."

If it sounds murky in theory, it produces wondrous results. Near the end of his set, Ze interrupted the band's zippy samba version of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" to sing an unfamiliar melody. He asked the crowd if they recognized it, but no one did. Undeterred, he sang it over and over. Just when people began shifting around uncomfortably, he admitted it was an inversion of a "very famous melody. You know the Beatles?" Soon, half the audience was singing the "Na-Na Na-Na" hook from "Hey Jude," while the other half sang it's minor-key inversion. The band joined in with the Deep Purple riff, and soon careened into "Defect 9: Juventude Javali" from Fabrication Defect. "Juventude" is about being a horny teen -- "chastity sneakers and tits, liquor . . . like a wild boar," Ze sang in Portuguese. So what riff did the band peel from their guitars as the song reached its abrupt climax?

The one from "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Plagiarizing the Stones, inverting the Beatles, playing hammers and newspapers alongside guitars -- Tom Ze is conjuring a musical future. Welcome to Arrastao.

RODD McCLEOD
(May 20, 1999)