Zap Mama: A Ma Zone

In the search for the next soul savior, it's tempting to lazily stay on American soil. Sure, soul music is inherently American, and recent discoveries such as Maxwell, Macy Gray, and D'Angelo are welcome, but some of the best R&B is actually being made overseas. The story of Zap Mama is yet another example of how borders can be eradicated through music: Zap Mama's Marie Daulne was born in Zaire to a Belgian father and a Zairian mother, raised in part by a tribe of Pygmies when Zaire erupted into civil war, and finally wound up in Belgium. Though Zap Mama's early releases were strictly a cappella, the group has grown to include a wide range of musical influences. While 1997's 7 initiated the band's formal exploration of soul music, the new A Ma Zone perfects it. Featuring guest performances by The Roots and producer This Kid Named Miles, the album incorporates hip hop, funk, drum-and-bass, and jazz into the framework of voices provided by Daulne and her fellow female singers. The lyrics may be almost exclusively in French, but the sentiments are universal in sound if not explicit in meaning: You don't need to sing along to appreciate the groove. In some ways, the international soul of Zap Mama set the stage for relative newcomers like Les Nubians—a group led by French/Cameroon sisters Helene and Celia Faussart and also aided by the hip-hop ambassadors in The Roots. Both bands prove once again that language and location can do nothing to slow the speed of sound and the spread of good music.