Zuba

Zuba wrote and rehearsed Allez! in the basement of a disused sandwich factory in the centre of Glasgow in the long, wet summer of 2004. The following recording sessions ran through to November. The main idea of recording these songs was to define, refine and capture Zuba’s existing live sound – a sound borne of a fusion of different cultures but not defined by them. Zuba’s Bassa Beat is global cosmopolitanism almost by accident of birth. The band members were friends, who just happened to be musicians from different parts of the world , before they were a band. Take a lead singer of Liberian griot lineage with a throat full of reggae and gospel, a Hebridean guitarist with a background in folk fingerpicking and 60s psychedelia, a Parisian percussionist who had travelled and drummed extensively in the world’s Latin quarters, an Aberdonian bassist with a fixation on finding the groove that would link Peter Gabriel’s world fusion and The Who, a Paisley-born jazz-inflected drummer who studied in Berklee, Boston, a Ugandan singer with a soul voice and an obsession with melancholic 70s singer-songwriters, and a Ghanaian dancer with one foot in the R’nB bag and the other dragging it away to African Gospel harmony choir recitals… stick them together in the back of a transit van for six years or so, lock them in a sandwich factory for a while and then entomb them in a smoke-filled recording studio and you have this album.