Daulne's life a musical journey

Daulne's life a musical journey

Zap Mama leader has seen it all

BY KEVIN RANSOM

News Special Writer

Marie Daulne, founder and leader of the world music, beat-happy group Zap Mama, has lived a full life - a globetrotting existence marked by terrible tragedy, loss, adventure, great artistic achievement, the admiration of her peers and commercial success.

She founded Zap Mama in 1990, following a series of epiphanies she experienced after returning as a young woman to the Congo, the land of her birth.

Zap Mama performs at Power Center on Tuesday.

As a child, Daulne had fled the Congo with her Congolese mother and siblings after her Belgian father, a white civil servant, was killed by Congolese rebels. Daulne was just a week old when her father was murdered.

She was subsequently raised in Brussels, Belgium, growing up on European and American music and culture. She also studied art and art history in high school and college.

But curious about her heritage, she made a pilgrimage of sorts back to her native Congo, which stirred up that part of her ancestral memory. She became enamored of Pygmy culture - not surprising, since it was the Pygmies who initially protected her and her family from the Congolese rebels. And she found that the strains of African music still resonated in her.

Zap Mama’s new album, “ReCreation” is an extension of the musical journey she has been on since that trip to the Congo. This time,

SEE ZAP MAMA, D2

PREVIEW

Zap Mama

What: Pan-cultural mix of African, Latin, pop,

R&B, electronic and hip-hop styles, Qool DJ Marv opens.

Where: Power Center, 121 Fletcher St.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday.

How much: $20-$30.

Details: 734-994-5999; 734-764-2538; www. annarborsummerfestival. org.

Marie Daulne and her world music group. Zap Mama, are at Power Center on Tuesday as part of the Ann Arhor Summer Festival.

ZAP MAMA From D1

Pan-cultural fusions have always intrigued Daulne

much of the music is rooted in the simmering equatorial grooves common to Brazilian music — which figures, since the first sessions took place in Rio de Janerio in May of 2008.

“T went to Rio to record one song and ended up being very inspired,” Daulne says. “I try to take inspiration from everything around me, and have an open mind. I took inspiration from the colors, the smells, the earthiness of the city. It was the effect I was looking for.

“And everything seemed very synchronized — the inspiration for the writing, meeting the right people, finding the right musicians. It’s wonderful when that kind of synchronicity happens in life,” she says in an interview from her new apartment in New York. (Her primary home is still in Brussels, though.)

But it has been a long time since the artistically restless and curious Daulne has been satisfied with doing a straight “genre” album. She always
been more intrigued by pancultural fusions. As the years have passed, she has drawn on various world music styles, as well as R&B and hip-hop. More recording sessions took place in Belgium, New York, Boston and Los Angeles, and the disc features guest vocalists, including Bilal, G. Love and the actor Vincent Cassel (“Ocean’s Twelve.”)

One track, “Paroles, Paroles,” is an Italian pop song from the ’70s, here translated into French. “That’s how I first heard it, as a child in Belgium in French,” says Daulne. “I later learned that it was an Italian song. For this record, though, I was interested in re-creating something from my past, but still make it my own."

Anther tune, “Chill Out,” slinks to an Afro-beat groove, and the lively “Singing Sisters” reunites Daulne with Sylvie Nawasadio and Sabine Kabongo - two members of the original line-up, when Zap Mama was strictly a female a capella group that drew primarily on Pygmy music.

“That was a song we recorded on one of our early albums, and, again, I just became interested in this idea of ‘re-creation,’ which is where the title of the album comes from,” she says.

“I was very interested in the idea of taking something from our past and re-creating it for the present, with some of the same singers” says Daulne. “I wanted to find that energy again that we had between us so many years ago.”

Kevin Ransom can be reached at
KevinRansom10@aol.com