Variety, KCRW World Festival - Review (Excerpt) >>
The planet represented in the fourth installment of this year's KCRW World Festival (headlined by Macy Gray) was one crazy, mixed-up place. It was a triple bill where at least two-thirds of the card worked at playing music that did not fit easily into any national pigeonhole, and a third that barely appeared to be in the gravitational pull of this or any other planet.
...Zap Mama is all about lead singer Marie Daulne's unassailable authority. Belgian by way of the Congo, the singer can be earthy and sly, doing somersaults across the stage or asking members of the audience their names and then turning those names into song lyrics, but there's a steely calm at the center of her voice that gives her music's pan-African grooves -- leavened with touches of beat box and, in "Supermoon," an elastic, "Walk on the Wild Side" lope -- a brooding seriousness that can make her sound like a maternal Bob Marley.
--Steven Mirkin
08/28/07 >> go there
