f30 “Y
ou absorb everything you see and hear and you’re happy to discover new things.” Despite feeling different from the other kids, Mezel didn’t feel displaced in Algeria: it was, she says a very positive experience, discover-
ing “the earth of the ancestors.” She feels she soaked up the cul- ture subliminally and that it now feeds her creativity.
Back in France, but still surrounded by mountains – the Massif Central – Mezel realised that music was her “lifebelt”. She was aged nine and living in Auvergne – where she noticed that every- thing was very green and very calm – when a kindly teacher noticed that Mezel and her sister had a talent for music and on Saturdays would give them the keys to the local music school. There was a piano there and a trumpet, which they would go and play. Their mother liked to dance the traditional folk dance of this region, so the sisters would listen to the music as their mother danced. “We would listen to the accordeon and all the French music that was in the air.”
Life here was very French, she remembers. “In Algeria they would cook cous-cous, you would hear voices – people coming and going. In France, the lunch on Sunday –there wasn’t the same social aspect to cooking, but it was very happy. I was raised very happily.” Whilst it was in Auvergne that Iness found she could play, it was two years later when the family moved to Paris that she decided to go to the local conservatoire and learn piano.
Despite the fact that her father has never seen her perform (though he’ll drop her mother off at her concerts and return to pick her up) it seems that he was happy for his daughter to study music. Mezel thinks that this was on the grounds that she was so absorbed by it, he was happy it prevented her from “going out and doing bad things”. It kept her busy at home whilst a growing teenager in the city.
But why won’t her father go to one of her gigs? Mezel takes a
sip of coffee, smiles and shrugs and her shiny dark curly hair bounces. She doesn’t know why he won’t come and listen to her and she doesn’t try and make him. She says that with her first album, Wedfel, she was trying to convince him, to draw him into her chosen work. “Hey, look, I’m singing in Berber.” It was impor- tant to her to show her father that she was both publicly and per- sonally embracing her roots, his roots. She knew that he’d been involved in the Algerian war of independence and she was begin- ning to discover the extent of the racism that is the Algerian expe- rience in France. She says she discovered it late because she’d never experienced it first hand, feeling as French as she does, though gradually she came to understand it was something that her father and grandmother had had to deal with.
Her decision to sing in Berber didn’t materialise until after her meeting with the Kabyle singer Djur Djura. They met at a festival, when Mezel plucked up the courage to go and tell her that she admired her music. By this time Mezel had plunged into the Paris musical scene and had immersed herself in the milieu.
She played with loads of different bands, and took up singing.
Learning jazz with Claude Césaire (nephew of Antillean poet Aimé Césaire), she inhabited a new sound world, inside the different chord progressions and harmonies. Then she studied with the noted Paris based American jazz singer Sarah Lazarus, and discovered a love of scat singing. Soon Mezel and her sister were busy working as backing vocalists for a wide range of groups, and it was her love of performing with the African bands, “because of the groove,” that led her to Djur Djura. It was another defining moment.
“The moment I discovered I could sing in Berber, was very important. When you’re an artist everything is possible but I thought ‘how am I going to express myself?’ When I met Djur Djura I thought ‘OK, I can compose, I can sing, do backing vocals’, but I thought ‘who am I? where am I going?’.” She saw the meet- ing as a sign that she needed to explore her heritage when Djura asked her to sing with her, so she took the opportunity. This led to Mezel performing traditional Berber repertoire with a modern twist, all over Europe, for a year. “It made me realise what I can do, but the music didn’t appeal so much. I knew though, that I had to express my Berber roots.” Whilst touring she was thinking of her own repertoire and at the end of the year decided to strike out with her sister and perform their own work.
They released an album, which also featured her close friend Norah Abdoun (Berber Singing Goes World Auvidis, 1997, re- released in 1999 with extra tracks as Wedfel, Naïve), after which
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