Zap Mama

Based in Brussels, Belguim, Zap Mama began its strange and storied career in 1990, as a multi-kulti, all-female, a cappella group under the leadership of musical visionary Marie Daulne.

But Daulne's own story starts much earlier. She born in Zaire (now known as Congo), where she lost her Belgian father to anti-Colonial violence in 1960, while she was still unborn. Like many Congolese before and after, her pregnant mother fled into the forest with her family, where they took refuge with local pygmy peoples before eventually escaping to Belguim as refugees. 20 years later, Marie would return to the very same forests to document and study the music and culture of these pygmies that had once sheltered her family.

Upon her return to Belguim, Dalune brought together four friends to found Zap Mama, which would blend her newly-learned pygmy a cappella techniques with minimal instrumentation and multi-kulti rhythms played out on their own bodies.

The group's 1993 debut, Adventures in Afropea I was an instant classic in worldbeat circles and one of the best-selling records in the nascent world music genre. That same year, Zap Mama connected strongly with American audiences and gained a strong feminist following as a support act for a 10,000 Maniacs tour.

Their subsequent string of releases saw the group expand their horizons by adding more instrumentation and flirting with a variety of different styles. Urban dance, soul and hip-hop were added to the mix alongside traditional African sounds, and Zap Mama's sound became increasingly sophisticated—even as some of the group's original members dropped out.

By the release of 2004's Ancestry in Progress the group had become Daulne and whoever she chose to collaborate with—which now included the likes of Common, The Roots, Talib Kweli and Erykah Badu. Zap Mama's 2007 release Supermoon found Daulne making even more sophisticated musical enquiries into her mixed, Afro-European roots. —Tom Pryor