Oregon Music News

Hindi Zahra

It should come as no surprise to Jazz aficionados that Moroccan born folk musician Hindi Zahra refers to Jazz music as “the only place where I can hear sounds from my homeland.” That’s because she grew up listening to the 6/8 “heartbeat” rhythm characteristic of African, Indian, and Middle Eastern music.

As a child, Hindi was surrounded by music. One of her uncles was big on improvisation. He pulled French, Spanish, English, Berber, and Arabic influences into his creations, and encouraged Hindi to be open to the possibilites that such an approach could offer. At eight or nine-years-old, Hindi gravitated toward experimenting with her voice, going so far as to spend hours every weekend in the bathroom playing off the rich acoustics provided by the small, tiled space. And later, when she was in her early teens, Hindi remembers confessing her musical aspirations to her mother, who surprised her daughter with confessions of her own. “I found out she had been a singer, and that she had been in the theater. It’s something of her former life that I didn’t know about her until then.” Such revelations gave Hindi confirmation of her natural tendencies toward music, which were steadily furthered by the presence of her uncle’s wide-ranging guitar compositions and the legacy of her grandfather, who was a well known musician in the area of Morocco where she was raised.

Recently, I had the delightful opportunity to talk on the telephone with Hindi, who lives in Paris.

“Sound has always fueled my imagination.”

Born in Khouribja, Morocco to Berber parents, Hindi grew up contemplative and in touch with nature. She had the sounds of Raï (rock music associated with Algeria) and North African Châabi (means popular in English), desert rock’n’roll, the blues of the great Malian Ali Farka Touré, and the folk music of Ismaël Lo in her ears. But it was nature that inspired her most. “In the studio, it is always challenging at first to work with a new sound engineer. I say, ‘I want my voice to sound like air, or like earth, or like dust.’ The engineers do not understand what I am saying in the begininning, but they always come around to the similarities, to the natural images I wish to invoke.”

“Art is nature. It’s the first creation, the real creation for me. Everything is linked to nature.”

When Hindi was only fifteen, her father moved the entire family to Paris so that the kids would have more opportunities. Once there, however, Hindi could not make friends and experienced the heartache and loneliness of being a foreign transplant for nearly five years. During this time, she consoled herself with music. She taught herself how to compose and continued the circular journey toward her singer/songwriter birthright. At eighteen, she got her first job at the legendary Louvre. “This was my meeting with art. The paintings gave me the same sensations [as when a child]. The Dutch masters were soothing, as music had always been.” Her music became like those paintings: a thing of “infinite inspirations.” It was not until her twenties that Hindi started performing with hip-hop groups in France. “I soon got fed up with the machines and loops, but what I took away from that experience was the understanding of what I really wanted to do.”

And now, at just thirty years old, Hindi Zahra has pulled Jazz up from its roots to craft some of the most original, inspired music. Perhaps this is because her gypsy guitar flare and poetic intensity are anchored by a way of singing that interprets emotion rather than definines it. Her seductive voice originates mid-throat, a place English speakers don’t often go with their vocals. It is a sweetly guttural melody that she croons. It veils her positive, gentle poetry with a touch of mystery, a dash of the exotic. You can hear Zahra’s Moroccan upbringing in every note. Like Edith Piaf before her, who was also a Berber singer living in France, Hindi chooses to push her voice out from the soul, from a place that is “not fake at all, very powerful, very rare.”

“Always about love.”

Her debut album, Handmade, has a playing time of 40 minutes and contains eleven songs sung in a mixture of English and Amazigh. Amazigh, which is the original language of the Berber (the first people who lived in North Africa) means “no territories,” or more specifically “free men of all the realms.” It is a language and a heritage that Hindi is proud of, and one which she evokes for its authenticity and lasting place in her heart. As a whole, her album plays like an exquisitely open call to Pop, Soul, Jazz, Folk, and Blues. Hindi alone was responsible for the production and arrangements, which feature traditional instruments like the bendir and ganoua. Tracks like “Imik Simik (Step by Step)” and “Petit à petit (Little by Little)” are chronicles of her life’s journey thus far, sung with a melancholic resonance that illustrates the depth of her soul. One can hear strains of Portishead, Manu Chao, Norah Jones, Billie Holliday, and even Patti Smith in the divination of Hindi’s voice.

Listen to “Fascination”:

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“Oursoul” is a word play. What looks like English is in fact a Berber word meaning “bygones”. With folk-like arrangements, the song tells of a young girl destined for marriage, though her dreams are unfulfilled. “Beautiful Tango” is “a ballad, a hymn to love, a sad thought.” It was praised by The Wire, Britain’s premiere alt music press, which heralded her as a worthy successor to Billie Holiday.

See Hindi Zahra perform at Holocene on October 3rd. Show starts at 8:30pm. Opening acts include Ryan Francesconi and DJ Santo. $10 advance. $12 day of show.