At a glance, the similarities between Zap Mama and Antibalas are few: African-inspired polyrhythms are just about it. Otherwise, the two ensembles are pretty disparate. Zap Mama, founded in the late ’80s, is the mostly-vocal project of Belgian artist Marie Daulne, who mixes polyphonics and the sounds of her native Democratic Republic of Congo. Antibalas, which got together in 1998, is a big group full of different instruments, as well known for serving as the band in Fela!, the Broadway musical, as for its own Afrobeat-inspired tunes.
But when a representative of concert-booker Columbia Artist Management Inc. came to Zap Mama’s Daulne with the idea of putting the two together on tour, it made sense to her.
“I asked him how come he thought that would sound good together,” she recalls. “But I liked the idea — especially because I saw Fela! on Broadway, and I was enjoying it so much, and it was Antibalas playing!
“For me, to have Antibalas, with the horns section, drums, bass, a whole Afrobeat band, it’s fantastic! It’s a plus.”
Both groups are no stranger to collaborating with others — to an extent, in fact, both have made it a big part of their missions.
“Collaborating with other artists is rewarding musically, first and foremost, which is why we do it,” explains Martin Perna, Antibalas’ musical director, via email. “It’s a welcome challenge to work with other artists and figure out what our common musical ground is and to build relationships with them and help them present their work with a particular sound that they probably couldn’t get on their own.”
Antibalas notably backed up David Byrne and St. Vincent on a track from their 2012 album Love This Giant, and appeared on TV on the Radio’s Dear Science in 2008. Guest spots like that, in addition to the Fela! gig, have made the ensemble more of a household name — though Perna is quick to note that fans of those parts of the band’s work don’t necessarily become die-hard Antibalas fans.
“When we went on tour with our last full-length album in 2012, we didn’t see much crossover from the Fela! musical audience, because the audience that goes to see an 8 p.m. show on Broadway is not the same audience that would go see us at a nightclub at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday,” Perna notes.
“More importantly, though, what we do in its most undiluted form goes over most people’s heads. We don’t follow pop-music song structure, and [our tracks] tend to be two to four times longer than any song you hear on the radio. The styles of music that inform what we do, unlike soul, funk, R&B, rock or be-bop, [aren’t] in the cultural DNA of mainstream America, so it’s still very foreign, exotic and weird to most people.”
With Zap Mama, Daulne has at times written and performed with instrumentalists, and at other times kept her arrangements purely vocal. (She’s also had everything from five voices in the group to just one.) Her ReCreation album, in 2009, was its own study in working together: It had featured guest spots from G. Love, Meshell Ndegeocello and Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, among others. In the past, she’s done tracks with The Roots, Common and Michael Franti.
With that groundwork laid, when the double-bill tour was proposed, Daulne wanted to take it to the next level.
“I asked [CAMI] and Martin [Perna], ‘Why don’t we merge the two?'” Daulne says. “Instead of just having one act go on after the other. You have to be creative today. We are four women and [Antibalas is] all men onstage; it’s easy to combine that energy.”
Perna, for his part, agreed.
“When they came to us with the idea of working with Zap Mama, it sounded great,” he explains. “The show will begin with the four Zap Mama vocalists doing their thing — tight harmonies, improvisation and vocal grooves. A few songs in, you’ll see members of Antibalas creeping on to back them up. Little by little, it will transition into our set, and we’ll be joined at the end by Marie and Zap Mama plugging into our material and Marie leading Antibalas.”
Besides Antibalas, another notable collaborator in Zap Mama’s live show these days is … you. Daulne recently launched what she calls the “vocal flash mob.” On Zap Mama’s website, Daulne makes available separated studio tracks for certain songs. She encourages audience members to learn a specific part and join in on the song live.
“I want to test [my new material], because it is a return to voices,” Daulne explains. “And I want the audience to be part of it, because I have a choir part — not choir like the classical way of Western reference, it’s more an ethnic choir, from the people. The only way is to ask the audience to do it, because I can’t tour with a full choir with me all the time.”
“It’s an easy part,” she adds with an air of reassurance.
If you’re worried about learning your part, don’t worry: Daulne is an experienced teacher.
“I don’t like to use the word ‘educate,'” though, she says. “I say ‘opening doors of sounds and possibilities.’ I do workshops for professional singers; I call that ‘vocal groove.’ It’s like if you want to take a class of yoga; I said, ‘Why don’t we start a class where we can groove together as vocalists?'”
It resonates well with Antibalas’ Perna, who earned a Master’s of Education in 2011 and has worked as a music educator and curriculum developer.
“Teaching electronic musicians in the classroom and online made me come full circle back to the fundamental idea that music is a social thing,” says Perna. “The music-making process is a growth process, and if you spend all of your time in front of a laptop, and never with other people, you’re not going to grow and the music is going to lack depth.”
Zap Mama has two new albums in the hopper — one ready for release soon — and Daulne has other projects on the docket as well. Besides facilitating her vocal grooves, she’s featured in a French animated film, based on Roy Lewis’s book The Evolution Man, Or, How I Ate My Father, to be released internationally this year.
Members of Antibalas are featured on the soundtrack of the new movie Mortdecai (“I don’t know if the film will be good, but the music is slammin’,” Perna notes), and Perna says the band is hoping to record this year, since this tour’s material is all unrecorded.
If Daulne has her way, perhaps there will be a collaborative album coming out of all this, too.
“Maybe with the fact that we’re out together with Antibalas, we can end with recording together, an album,” she says. “Nobody has really confirmed anything, but the energy’s so wonderful. I know it’s going to be fantastic. From there, maybe it can be a record.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story used the inaccurate term “instrumental” to describe Antibalas, a group that includes a full complement of rhythm-section and wind instruments but also often features vocals.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2015.
