Zouk

Want to have a party? Music, please!

That seems to be the way the word zouk developed in the special variety of French spoken in the French Antilles of the West Indies. Zouk means "party," but it also means a kind of dance music developed for partying. It is light and lively, blending modern technology with traditional instruments, rhythms, and melodies.

Zouk music took a roundabout way to reach English. Musicians from Guadeloupe started zouk not in the West Indies but in France. In the late 1970s, the group known as Kassav began playing what they called zouk in Paris. In the late 1980s, zouk became known in England and in the United States. By 1993, it was well enough known that the University of Chicago Press could publish a scholarly book on zouk, by Jocelyne Guilbault, asserting that zouk is an important component of world music.

Like any other music, zouk is hard to describe in words. "It is based on interlocking rhythmic and melodic patterns rather than a dense sound where all instruments play simultaneously," says the All-Music Guide on the World Wide Web.

The language of zouk music is Lesser Antillean Creole French, a long name referring to a mixed language, based on French, that developed for trade purposes centuries ago. It is spoken by the 350,000 people of the French possession of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles, as well as by more than half a million others in nearby Martinique, Grenada, and other islands, and in France itself. The word zouk may have originated in the Bambara word juke discussed in the African section of this book. No other words of Lesser Antillean Creole French are widely current in English.

In Brazil, the zouk rhythm is used to dance a Brazilian dancing style, however, with movements more suited to the music. Zouk Lambada is usually very fast and frantic. Unlike that, the zouk in Brazil is often slow and sensual, enabling many steps and turns.