Zouk

What it is

Pierre-Edouard Decimus had been in a carnival band in Guadeloupe for twenty years when he decided in 1979 that Antillean music needed a studio production as good as anything coming out of Paris. Kassav, the group he built with Jacob Desvarieux, took the local gwo ka and biguine rhythms, put them through a drum machine and a rack of synthesisers, and recorded in Paris with a horn section. Zouk means party in Antillean Creole and it started as a name for the dance itself. By the mid eighties it was the dominant popular music of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cape Verde and a good part of west and central Africa, and the slow version of it that came later has outlasted the fast one everywhere.

What it sounds like

Digital and glossy on purpose. A gated snare with a short bright reverb, a synth bass with a plucked attack, and stacks of DX7 electric piano and brass. Guitars are clean, chorused and played in short chords high up the neck. The percussion is real and sits underneath: a boula drum and a pair of sticks on bamboo, mixed low but always present, which is the thing that stops the record sounding like eighties European pop. Vocals are in Creole, layered in thirds, with a long plate reverb on the lead and none at all on the group.

Key elements

• Ti-bwaTwo sticks on a length of bamboo laid across the knees, playing a fixed figure that dates from the bele and chouval bwa traditions of Martinique. It is the oldest thing in the arrangement.
• The boulaThe supporting gwo ka drum, playing an answering figure against the ti-bwa. In a Kassav mix it is quiet enough to be mistaken for a conga loop and it is not one.
• Gated snareA short bright reverb chopped off hard, on 2 and 4. It is the sound of the decade zouk was made in and removing it makes the record sound like something else.
• Anticipation on the and of 4The kick pushes into the barline instead of waiting for it, which is what gives zouk its forward lean at a fairly slow tempo.
• Zouk loveThe slow ballad version that took over from the mid nineties and became the international default. Same rhythm, twenty beats slower, with the percussion further down.

How to get them

• Ti-bwaA woodblock or a dry clave sample with a little body in it. Program the figure and leave it identical in both bars; this is the fixed part everything else is measured against.
• BoulaA conga sample tuned down a couple of semitones, played mostly as open tones with a slap on the offbeat. Keep it four or five decibels below the kit.
• SnareA bright eighties sample into a gated plate: 1.2 seconds of decay with the gate closing at about 180 milliseconds. Do not sidechain it to anything, and do not soften the gate edge.
• BassA synth bass with a fast plucked envelope, not a sub. Play the root on the and of 4 before each chord change and let it ring across the barline.
• KeysAn FM electric piano and a synth brass patch, both bright, playing short chords on the offbeats. Chorus on the piano, none on the brass, and pan them apart.
• Tempo118 for the classic Kassav feel. For zouk love drop to around 100 and pull the percussion lanes down; the pattern itself does not need to change.

Reference points

Kassav, Pierre-Edouard and Georges Decimus, Jacob Desvarieux, Jocelyne Beroard, plus Malavoi, Zouk Machine, Edith Lefel and the Guadeloupean gwo ka players Kassav learned from. Named as reference points, not as endorsements.