"Wickedly brilliant . . . truly cracked and truly inspired."
--San Francisco Chronicle

Performing in the first event of Música Novo: Brazil , a three-part series exploring contemporary Brazilian music, "Dada-pop" composer-guitarist Tom Zé returns to the Walker Art Center on Saturday, May 22 at 8 pm, with a resounding union of sonic companheiros --a Brazilian percussionist and the entire Chicago-based avant-rock group Tortoise . For nearly 25 years, Zé, a founding member of the Tropicalismo movement, has been fusing rock, psychedelia, and art music with folkloric rhythms and song forms such as samba. Tortoise is comprised of five Minimalist pop innovators whose instrumentation includes bass, six-string bass, lap steel, vibraphone, xylophone, keyboards, guitar, EML 101, marimba, melodica, and assorted percussion. The performance features a full range of Zé's material, including music from his newest Luaka Bop release, Fabrication Defect .

Upcoming Música Novo: Brazil events feature the legendary Caetano Veloso (July 12 at Northrop Auditorium) and Virginia Rodrigues (October 25 at the Walker Auditorium).

At age 62, Zé continues to push the musical envelope, teaching metal machine music how to dance samba, get drunk, and cry. Over the past five years, Zé has tinkered with the "Salad of things," including instruments built from household appliances, to comprise his art into an "esthetic of plagiarism." "Everything is plagiarized," he says. He likes to term his borrowings in more active terms, his muse is plunder and urban theft. In his mind, there are but tiny steps between Russian literature, the lullabies his mother sang, socialist economics, and e.e. cummings-style word games.

Tortoise's third full-length release, TNT , was written and recorded during a 10-month interval in 1997 and released in March 1998. A seven-month tour followed in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan. TNT, the group's most ambitious project to date builds upon the spare, instrumental framework of its first, self-titled album, and the extended edits, melodic adventures, and klangfdrben of the subsequent full-length release, Millions Now Living Never Die . Tortoise has spent the past four years releasing 12" re-mix singles of its own material re-worked by a number of artists from a variety of genres and fields.

Tickets to Tom Zé are $16 ($13 Walker members) and are available at the Walker box office or by calling 612.375.7622 (voice); 612.375.7585 (Touchtone Device for the Deaf).