Charles Aznavour-one of Piaf’s protégés-also drew the parallel, and after a duet with Zaz dubbed their partnership “ZAZnavour.” Last year producer Thomas Langmann, ( The Artist), approached Zaz about playing La Môme in an upcoming film. But her career, built around a warm, low, hoarse and mesmerizing voice plus an incandescent persona, carries one more strand: “I’m not Piaf,” she says in response to comparisons that began with her first album in 2010. Insouciant and pensive, outgoing and solitary, simultaneously fearful and ready to open up, Zaz channels her selves into her art. Nos vies (Our Lives) is an optimistic poem of coexistence, whether for the world or for two (video 4).
There’s a revealing tenderness to Demain c’est toi (Tomorrow It’s You), about the child she hopes to have one day (video 2) and with the intimate Ma valse (My Waltz) she enters a dazzling reverie of confidence and vulnerability, embracing her bright and dark sides (video 3). In Qué vendrá (Whatever Happens), Zaz-born Isabelle Geffroy-delivers an irrepressible French-Spanish reflection on writing her own life (video 1). Known for retro-modern French chanson and jazz manouche, on Effet Miroir (Mirror Effect), her fourth album, she presents a more nuanced and eclectic soundscape, 15 songs (three self-written) uniting diverse personal facets and contradictions and mixed with multiple genres-chanson, to be sure, but also salsa, rock, pop, country and soul-into a synthesized self-portrait. Zaz, one of the most popular French artists abroad, did three world tours in four years and says her adventures reshaped her sense of self. Camus argued that travel is a spiritual testing, stripping us of habitual surroundings and taking us not away from but toward our essence.
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