Hector Zazou

Hector Zazou came into the world in Algeria prior to independence, the child of a French father and Spanish mother. His earliest recordings date to the mid-1970s, when he formed the duo ZNR alongside Joseph Racaille. The resulting music is buoyant, whimsical French chamber jazz laced with melodic invention, Zazou contributing keyboards and violin. Although any initial provocativeness has faded, the lean instrumentation leaves most pieces feeling like outlines rather than finished works; nevertheless ZNR already signals his attraction to unusual timbres and his wide-ranging sonic curiosity. No readily available documents chart his activities through the remainder of the 1970s and the early 1980s, aside from a handful of erotic experiments issued under the name La Perversita.

By the early 1980s Zazou had begun a string of fruitful partnerships with Zairean vocalist Bony Bikaye. Their collaborations fused ceremonial, tribal singing with crisp, forward-looking synthesizer percussion in a style far removed from standard world pop. The music quickly drew notice from European and New York tastemakers and enjoyed a period of popularity in club environments. Zazou’s compositional voice emerged most clearly, however, on the singular Reivax Au Bongo, a musical “photo-novel” issued with an illustrated booklet and set inside the imaginary kingdom of Bongo. As composer and arranger he drew on the voices of Bikaye, the celebrated African singer Kanda Bongo Man, and an operatic mezzo-soprano, yet situated them well outside any African, operatic, or familiar context. The same integrative impulse animates the remarkable Geographies and Geologies, two eccentric and beguiling orchestral suites. Within Zazou’s sound-world, operatic arias, children’s songs, Afro-pop, jazzy brass writing, and delicate chamber textures coexist without descending into careless pastiche; the result remains unmistakably his—elegant, playful, droll, and faintly decadent. One contemporary critic observed that the music was avant-garde enough to satisfy a listener’s grandmother, provided she happened to be an unusually progressive grandmother.

Having established his abilities as composer and arranger, at least to his own satisfaction, even if his label enjoyed only modest North American distribution, Zazou moved into production. The first such project was 1992’s Sahara Blue, a sultry homage to the symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud on which Zazou also wrote and arranged the material while adding keyboards and electronics. Two years later he reversed direction geographically with the lean yet widely admired Songs From the Cold Seas, a tribute to Arctic regions that again found him producing, arranging, composing, and performing on keyboards and electronics. Both collections, and especially the second, illustrate the regard in which Zazou is held by the international avant-garde; among the participants were John Cale, David Sylvian, Suzanne Vega, Björk, and Jane Siberry. The critical and modest commercial success of these conceptual releases, the latter appearing on a major label, suggested further undertakings of the same kind. In 1996 and 1997, however, he turned to more intimate collaborations with minimalist keyboardist Harold Budd and Celtic singer-composer Barbara Gogan. Lights in the Dark appeared in 1998.