Zaz, with her dark hair and expressive eyes was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a plaid top, someone who could easily blend in on the city streets, save for her infectious joy and beautiful, melodious voice. Attending a live concert of Zaz, even as someone who doesn't remember much of the French language from their years studying it in high school, was a wonderful experience for me, just to see the sheer joy onstage. Her music is at once bluesy and French, and also simultaneously infectious. Zaz is an extraordinary female French singer, and her live performance does not disappoint. In her homeland, meanwhile, the record achieved the rare feat of going Diamond – more than 500,000 copies shifted. Her self-titled debut record, released in 2010, was a massive hit across Europe, going to the top of the charts in a slew of countries and achieving multi-platinum sales certifications in Belgium, Germany, Poland and Switzerland, as well as platinum discs in Austria and Russia. Her music is a blend of pop, jazz and soul, but there’s something unmistakeably French about it too, even if many of the artists from which she’s known to have taken her cues are from the English-speaking world.
Influenced, in her early years, by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Enrico Macias and Bobby McFerrin – a diverse bunch, then – she began to sing in jazz groups across both her native France and their nearby Basque Country, which is what, in retrospect, came to inform her sound.
Having been classically trained in a range of musical disciplines as a child – choral singing, violin, piano and guitar in particular – it always looked as if Zaz was set for a bright musical future, and so it would eventually prove when she won a scholarship to a modern music school in Bordeaux, which she used as the platform from which to launch her career.
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