Yaroslav Vlasov (Berau) é filólogo.
Vive em Moscou, Rússia e é também sound designer e editor da Radio Europa-Plus.

I got somewhat familiar with Tom Zé's music by chance, and it was the very moment, as I see it now, for me to really need it.
Any thinking man, if he is not going to stop his development etc., once feels that the mentality of people surrounding him is no longer any base for creative or intellectual inspiration. It is twice so in Russia, for Russia is one of the most mentally isolated nations. While everyone here is included into Anglo-Saxon music and poetic information field, with its Rock/Pop mainstream, we almost never realize what great massive of material and moods we are lacking.
Who can introduce all the depth and expression of some other mentality for a thinking man, but a thinking artist? Tom Zé, for me, is just this sort of phenomena: the artist that becomes understandable at once, for his motivations are close to motivations of any open-minded intellectual. More than that: here in dark-mooded Russia one can feel a certain hunger for positive but not primitive emotions, for irony without cynism… these emotions are not typically produced by Russian non-mainstream musicians, and neither is this magnetic rhythmism. But a cosmopolite’s mind tends to be wider than a nationally-typical one usually is. In this sense Tom Zé shows the most international art I ever saw. His rhythms press the music deeply into the mind making this mind not tired of this music, so it’s not enough just to know and remember these compositions but they are worth re-listening…  

Furthermore, I found at last an artist who lacks any kind of musicians’ snobism (being well-educated in the proper field), and who is not that afraid of combinating complete and simple elements, what produces the effect of true, open and mature emotionality. With his creative work in the field of music Tom Zé, surely, expresses his perception of the world, but not just “works out” the music.

And one more thing surprised me a lot. While Brasilian music had developed rather independently from the world’s mainstream, having created its own mainstream that is also well-known, Tom Zé shows quite another type of the artist’s psychology – in comparison with nearly all the pop/rock artists we know by now. We’ve got used to the stereotypic (descending from the Anglo-Saxon rock) position of “life experience – then creation”, when an artist expresses sooner his own private and very socialized life-perception (usually of “victim” nature gone deliberately through the hell of drugs and other ways of searching an individual way in the trash-can of common weaknesses), then his generalized universe-perception, supplied by real and mature intellect. For me the latter variant is always more interesting, and Tom Zé is one of few, very few!, who gives it.