Phillip Kakaza
Feeling stressed out from switching on the radio and getting only hip-hop and R&B? Well, the Belgium-based Afropop group Zap Mama will dose you with acappella and rhythm at Arts Alive on Thursday.
At last year’s festival we saw outstanding international acts, like Beninoise funk diva Angelique Kidjo. This year the French Institute will import Zap Mama as part of their Austrof Africa Tour.
All five vocalists are women – four of African descent and one Portuguese – who use their magnificent vocal arrangements to transport audiences down the tributaries of Africa.
From a blues wail to a diva shout their perfect pitches, rhythms and improvisations can be as lofty as a moon flight, or as low down as the blood dripping from a tsotsi dying in the gutter.
With their bodies and voices they imitate nature and borrow sounds from our modern environment – cars, cellphones, sirens and televisions.
What Zap Mama have mastered is the recycling of sound pollution into metaphorical songs.
Founded in 1990 by lead vocalist Marie Daulne, Zap Mama’s first album propelled them on to the international scene, gaining them a large following in both Europe and America.
The album – released by ex-Talking Head David Byrne’s label Luaka bop – went gold in Belgium, and became the United States’s best-selling world music album in 1993.
Their hectic tours abroad, the same year, were interrupted for the making of a television documentary – Mizeka Mama . The documentary, which combines interviews and performances, won them a major US documentary award.
The documentary is also a testimony to Daulne’s upbringing. As a youth growing up in the early Sixties in the Belgian Congo, her family endured political strife and rebellion, only to seek refuge among the pygmies.
Later, her family escaped to Belgium after her father was assassinated by Katanga rebels.
As a result, the dreadlocked poet/songwriter/singer Daulne became fascinated by pygmy culture, and infused its rhythms – as well as those of Australia’s aboriginals and Indians – into her music.
The first two albums released were full of playfully percussive melodies sung in polyglot textures of French, pygmy and Portuguese.
Their new release, simply called 7, demonstrates more hybrid sounds adding piano, blues, reggae and funk to their rich repertoire. Collaborating on this new release is U-Roy of New World and Spearhead’s Michael Franti.
Zap Mama performs at Mega Music Warehouse on September 17 as part of the Arts Alive International Festival. They will do a Cape Town performance at the River Club on September 19 as part of their Austrof Africa Tour.