Artist: Hector Zazou
Genre(s):
Ethnic
Electronic
New Age
Blues
Discography:
Lights In The Dark
Year: 1998
Tracks: 13
Made On Earth
Year: 1997
Tracks: 11
Songs From The Cold Seas
Year: 1994
Tracks: 11
Sahara Blue
Year: 1992
Tracks: 12
Guilty
Year: 1992
Tracks: 10
Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses
Year: 1991
Tracks: 17
Geologies
Year: 1990
Tracks: 13
Reivax Au Bongo
Year: 1987
Tracks: 15
Geographies
Year: 1982
Tracks: 21
Zazou, Hector - Lights In The Dark
Year:
Tracks: 13
Kamasutra
Year:
Tracks: 13
Born of a French fatherhood and Spanish mother in pre-independence Algeria, Hector Zazou first recorded in the mid-'70s under the name ZNR, as one half of a duet with Joseph Racaille. This early knead is wakeful merely piquant French chamber jazz, lyrical and far-out, with Zazou playing keyboards and violin. The music has long since preoccupied whatever radical edge, and the thin instrumentation gives to the highest degree of the pieces more than the effectual of musical sketches than fully completed compositions, just in ZNR, Zazou begins to prove his interest in unusual instrumental timbres and colours, as well as his eclecticist musical vision. Throughout the rest of the seventies and into the early '80s, Zazou's musical efforts (whatever they mightiness get been), ar not represented by any pronto available recordings, but some experiments in musical erotica were apparently conducted under the name La Perversita.
In the early '80s, Zazou's music took another guidance, when he began a series of very successful collaborations with Zairean isaac Bashevis Singer Bony Bikaye. This was non only touchstone domain pop, only a distinctive combination of ritualistic, tribal vocals and futurist, percussive synth musical accompaniment. Zazou and Bikaye attracted the attention of European and New York City trendsetters, and their music became a fixture on the club scene for a time. But Zazou's real talent was number one displayed on his next button, the outlandish Reivax Au Bongo, a supposed musical "photo-novel," with an concomitant booklet, coiffure in the mythologic kingdom of Bongo. As composer and organiser, Zazou utilizes the vocal talents of both Bikaye and some other spectacular African creative person, Kanda Bongo Man, as well as an operatic mezzo, merely in contexts far removed from Africa, traditional opera, or anything else. This is Zazou's dealer gift, which he develops farther on the marvellous Geographies and Geologies, two strange and rattling orchestra suites. In his musical public, anything is fair game -- operatic arias, children's songs, Afro-pop, flashy french horn charts, and ticklish bedroom medicine. And kind of than looking like a regardless pastiche (which is what you'd expect), it sounds, good -- like Hector Zazou. Sophisticated, wizard, witty, and only a weensy bit decadent -- to paraphrasis unitary modern-day reviewer, this is new wave, vanguard music that your grannie would making love (providing she was a pelvis granny).
Having proven himself as a composer and arranger (at least to his satisfaction -- his label was not widely distributed in North America), Zazou decided to try out his hand at production as well, first in 1992 with Sahara Desert Blue, the turned on and reminiscent testimonial to French symboliser poet Arthur Rimbaud (with Zazou besides written material and arranging the medicine, and tributary keyboards and "electronics"), and so, two eld later, radically neutering his geographics with the stern just as successful Songs From the Cold Seas, a tribute to the Arctic regions. (Once again, Zazou produces, arranges, composes and contributes keyboards and electronics.) Both of these collections, and the minute in peculiar, demonstrate the international respect which Zazou commands among the musical vanguard, as the heel of contributors ranges from John Cale and David Sylvian to Suzanne Vega, Björk and Jane Siberry. The decisive and relative commercial success of these two "conception" CDs (the lowest unrivaled on a major label) will no doubtfulness guarantee future projects of the same sort from Zazou, just in 1996 and 1997, he returned to less ambitious collaborations with item-by-item artists, including minimalist/ambient keyboardist Harold Budd and Celtic singer/composer Barbara Gogan. Lights in the Dark followed in 1998.
