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Concert Review
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MTV Iggy, Concert Review >>
Zaz @ Webster Hall
Blue Notes of Happiness
Zaz skipped onstage at Webster Hall’s ballroom during GlobalFest 2012 in New York City and executed a sort of jig when she got to the mic, adding her voice to the gently swinging jazz melody her three-piece band had underway. Her two guitarists, and one bassist stood behind her, unassumingly providing a simple backdrop to her effusive vocal jazz pop. Wearing mismatched high tops with a feathery LBD, she seemed like an uncommon songbird, constantly in motion. For much of the set she demonstrated an uncanny ability to sing and dance with vaudevillian elan, while also playing a snare drum with brushes.
The compact Paris-based chanteuse sang the way she danced: playfully, with style that united the unpredictable qualities of Edith Piaf, Björk, and Ella Fitzgerald. Her music owes a lot to the jazz manouche of Django Rhinehardt as well, and her hard, colorful vibrato evoked a lonely gypsy ballad as much a Parisian chanson. But Zaz’s approach is fresh and modern to a fault, with her singer-songwriter’s individualism and childlike joie de vivre. For extra brassiness, she adds in a touch of American soul in the tradition of Aretha Franklin.
These things keep her songs from evoking too many images of Paris streets in the days before color photography. Zaz’s physicality as a performer helps to create a lot of the living color — even vocally. She is unafraid to strain her voice — even to yell — seemingly because of an uncontainable zest for life. Then there is her choice of lyrical subject matter. A few songs are maudlin or genuinely depressing but most are whimsical, dealing with fairies, feelings, and how good it is to be unconventional and free-spirited.
Accordingly, most of her songs froth and bubble like strawberry soda, but more than a few are tinged with unexpected blue. And this is the entire reason to listen to Zaz. She would be stupefyingly insipid, or perhaps just oddly static, if it wasn’t for the blue notes — for the moments when she dips precipitously into melancholy for a bar or two, only to lift out of it just as quickly, as if it never happened. The wounded notes reveal the rain behind the sunny demeanor and hand kazoo. They render all her songs just a little haunted
“My English is thbbbppt!” the singer lamented between songs. But her springy scat needed no translation, and quite a few audience members were prepared to sing along in French. The ballroom filled to the edges with swaying, clapping, sometimes jumping bodies that were eventually, like Zaz, constantly in motion. There’s undeniable power in her breathless energy and lax traditionalism — the power, evidently, to get Americans to listen to jazz. But the effervescence would be nothing without that shadow of tears — the slight suggestion that she sings and dances, in fact, to keep them at bay. 01/13/12 >> go there
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