Avant-garde composer Tom Zé emerged from Brazil’s tropicalia movement in the late ’60s, but that’s more a function of being from Bahia and being too musically restless to be work solely with traditional Brazilian musical forms. Like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil — his contemporaries, his music blends the personal and the political automatically, though with more imaginative, poetic confrontations of power than many American artists have conceived of. Admittedly, much of that you pick up through reading, not through listening, and unless you speak Portuguese, you probably won’t get the critique of male/female relations that motivate Estudando O Pagode. The chattering quotes of “Ave Maria,” the interplay between processed and natural voices, and the density of the arrangements hint that something playful is up, though, particularly when laid over conventional song structures and dance rhythms.