Hector Zazou: Eclectic producer and pioneer of world music collaborations

Hector Zazou was an adventurous, eclectic and prolific musician who pioneered the concept of the artist-as-producer and made an international name for himself with his sensitive and accessible world music fusions.

Born Pierre Job and deriving his stage name from the "Zazou" hipster subculture that blossomed in post-war France, he began his career in the late-1960s milieu of Marseilles, graduating from avant-garde rock and jazz dabblings to classically inspired work in the 1970s. He formulated a more outward-looking approach in the early 1980s, leading to some of the first successful cross-cultural musical collaborations.

Combining the work of folk artists with an array of popular singers and musicians, he was most widely known for albums in the early and mid-1990s such as Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses (1991), Sahara Blue (1992) and Chansons des mers froides (1994). He remained active as a recording artist and producer until shortly before his death, eventually producing or contributing to around 40 albums.

"In England they have Peter Gabriel, in America they have David Byrne and in France we have Hector Zazou," the French journalist Jean-François Bizot wrote. Zazou himself once declared: "If music cannot change the world, what use does it have?"

Zazou spent his early childhood in the provincial city of Sidi Bel Abbès in north-western Algeria, where his French father and Spanish mother were pieds-noirs – of European descent but born in Algeria. They eventually emigrated to Marseilles to escape the War of Independence in the early 1960s.

As a teenager, Zazou became involved in Marseilles' fertile underground music scene, becoming a multi-instrumentalist and eventually joining the experimental rock/free jazz collective Barricades, whose politically informed music was inspired by the likes of the American avant-blues oddball Captain Beefheart.

With a former Barricades member, Josef Racaille, Zazou formed ZNR, (Zazou 'n' Racaille) whose début album Barricades 3 was released in 1977. Equally influenced by chamber music, the composer Erik Satie and the German krautrockers Faust, it gave the first indication of Zazou's developing wizardry as a producer, despite a very low budget. After a second ZNR release, Zazou made his solo début, the lyrically provocative La Perversita (1979).

In 1983, Zazou joined forces with the Congolese singer Papa Wemba to record the 12-inch single "Malimba" for Crammed Discs – his first world music collaboration, and one of the earliest of its kind. Zazou has said he regarded the 1980s as his apprenticeship in the studio. During these years he made three albums with Bony Bikaye (another Congolese artist), starting with the seminal Noir & Blanc (1983), which included the participation of Vincent Kenis, who was later responsible for the popular Congotronics series.

In the same period, Zazou created a series of albums experimenting with classical music, most notably Reivax au Bongo (1986) and Géologies (1989), which respectively backed vocalists and string quartets with electronica. During this period and in the following decade he also worked as a journalist, often writing travel articles, which tied in well with his musical interests.

In 1991, partly inspired by Peter Gabriel's album Passion: Music For The Last Temptation of Christ, which Gabriel developed from his score for the Martin Scorsese film, Zazou recorded Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses with the eponymous Corsican group, which became his first substantial international success.

There followed a series of ambitious concept albums exploring a wide range of styles, with artists from backgrounds as diverse as world, pop, avant-garde and classical music. Sahara Blue commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, and featured contributions from John Cale, Gérard Depardieu, the Algerian multi-instrumentalist Khaled, Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass fame and the former Japan singer David Sylvian, among many others.

On the album Chansons des mers froides (entitled Songs From the Cold Seas for the Anglophone market), Zazou used ravishing electronic settings to showcase mainly female pop and folk singers from countries in northerly latitudes. The album featured the first internationally released example of Björk singing in her native Icelandic, as well as performances by Siouxsie Sioux, Jane Siberry and the Scottish singer Catherine-Ann McPhee.

Notable subsequent projects included Lights In The Dark (1998), a New Age-flavoured exploration of ancient Celtic music involving several Irish singers, and Strong Currents (2003), which featured an all-female line-up of vocalists which included Laurie Anderson, Jane Birkin, the former Communard Sarah-Jane Morris as well as the British singer-songwriter and cellist Caroline Lavelle, one of Zazou's many long-term collaborators.

In the same year, Zazou produced the album Yol Bolsin by the Uzbeki singer Sevara Nazarkhan for Peter Gabriel's Real World label, which saw her win the Best Asian Artist category in the BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music. More recently, he composed the soundtrack for a new version of Robert Flaherty's 1922 silent documentary Nanook of the North, and became a member of Bill Reiflin's experimental musical collective Slow Music, along with the former King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp and Peter Buck of REM.

His last recording was the ambient instrumental album In The House of Mirrors, scheduled for release later this month. Recorded in Bombay with Uzbeki and Indian instrumentalists, it returns his music to a refined and peaceful simplicity.

Jon Lusk

Pierre Job (Hector Zazou), musician, composer, record producer and journalist: born Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria 11 July 1948; (one son); died Paris 8 September 2008.