Hardly have her lips approached the microphone than your ear is drawn in, gently but irresistibly. Just the slightest nonchalance in the hips with a filigree of swing in the delivery, a delicately veiled voice. Meet Hindi Zahra and her original gently undulating sense of melody. With a subtle, understated guitar accompaniment, a dash of gypsy guitar between the lines, and a hint of blues but with a capital B. Time stands still. Intense, intimate, poetic vibrations, with a velvety feline timbre. At thirty, Hindi Zahra is neither a reality show wonder nor the umpteenth shooting star fizzing across the firmament of vocal jazz. Music is the story of her life, a family affair. The story of a Berber girl born in Morocco. Her father was in the army and her mother a housewife, occasional actress and singer of village repute. Among her uncles were musicians, into the post-psychedelic Moroccan scene of the time. She grew up to the sound of divas ¾ raï and châabi, like Cheikha Rimitti, and the great Egyptian Oum Khalsoum ¾ between traditional Berber music and desert rock’n’roll, with the blues of the great Malian Ali Farka Touré and the sensual folk music of Ismaël Lo in the wings. All this before she set out across the Mediterranean to join her father in Paris. She left school and got her first job at 18 in the Louvre. “This was my meeting with art. As a child, I was contemplative, in touch with nature. The paintings gave me the same sensations.” The Dutch masters were soothing, as music had always been. “Sound has always fuelled my imagination.” Her dreams were soon to materialise. At night she worked secretly on melancholic lyrics and wrote melodies for years. “When it comes to music I’m prepared to work long and hard.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 23:35:22 +0000
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