SCOTT SIMON, host:
When Camel Zekri was a kid hanging onto the back of his parents' Peugeot, the drive home from Paris to southern Algeria - little like being in a movie, finding his musical roots. Now, he's one of the foremost afro-jazz artists in Europe. Camel Zekri refuses the kind of cultural definitions many American jazz performers use to describe their music.
In this report, Camel Zekri tells Frank Browning how learning to make his own kind of music enabled him to form his own Franco-African identity.
FRANK BROWNING: Camel Zekri is a man whose life and art emerged from the clash of two cultures.
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BROWNING: At their most extreme, Camel Zekri's free improvisations are no closer to the spirit ceremonies his parents knew in Algeria than they are to the formal music he studied at Paris conservatories.
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BROWNING: Zekri says it took him a quarter century to bring his music and his identities together.
Mr. CAMEL ZEKRI (Musician): (Through Translator) There were two separate parts of my life. In Algeria, I didn't speak of France and the music I did here -classical, jazz, reggae. But here in France, I was never doing or talking about Arabic or Algerian music I did there.
BROWNING: Camel Zekri is a big man - around six-feet-four, just under 200 pounds. In Europe, he's generally seen as an improvisational jazz musician.
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BROWNING: But Zekri scrunches up his eyebrows when you ask him if his music is really jazz.
Mr. ZEKRI: (Through Translator) Jazz is a word; it's not the music. Why not salsa? Why not Bossa Nova? Reggae? You can't say this is not jazz. It's an encounter among people who have given us music. It's not one person who has given us this music, it's a meeting of different people and cultures.
BROWNING: He set aside classical technique. He changed the placement of his hands, he expanded the scale to encompass Arabic, Berber and African sounds. Sitting in his modest apartment outside Paris, he picked up his guitar to illustrate.
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BROWNING: Last winter, Camel Zekri encountered a world beyond music. He collaborated with the National Dance Theatre of Caen on a new work. Nine dancers - three French, three Japanese and three from Congo - joined with Camel Zekri.
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BROWNING: Hela Fatoumi, one of the choreographers, says that Zekri's approach to music was the perfect match for the company's creole-style improvisational dance.
Ms. HELA FATOUMI (Choreographer, National Dance Theater of Caen): We need really musician that be in the moment with the dance that the dance and the music rise in the same time. Camel is an artist so open mind and so purist. (Soundbite of music)
BROWNING: Camel Zekri says that when it comes to pushing musical boundaries, his great breakthrough came when he and his partner, Dominique Chevaucher, started a series of Euro-African musical cruises along some of sub-Saharan Africa's major rivers.
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BROWNING: They called these water music and at each river village indigenous musicians would join them.
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BROWNING: In 2000, they found themselves in a tiny village in Burkina Faso, waiting for their boat to be delivered overland by truck. Each night, they played impromptu for their hosts until finally the boat arrived. Chevaucher says it was too big for them to unload alone.
Ms. DOMINIQUE CHEVAUCHER (Musician): The village decided to stop to work and 250 men, maybe more, come and help us to take the boat from the truck, all the village.
BROWNING: Young and old, they hoisted the wooden boat onto their shoulders and carried it into the water.
Ms. CHEVAUCHER: We say thank you, thank you, thank you. But they say, no, we want to thank you for this, and they organize a big ceremony for us. And we see a ceremony which is very difficult to see. So, it was something magic.
BROWNING: It was exactly the kind of exchange Camel Zekri had been seeking.
Mr. ZEKRI: (Through Translator) It enabled me to find a balance within myself -an African and at the same time a European by training and education. I needed to show both sides. So, the Festival of Water enabled me to gather everyone on a boat and to create improvisational music in each village collectively, together. It's the best way I could find to express who I am.
BROWNING: In October, at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, Zekri and Chevaucher collaborated with musicians from Congo to mount one of the Water Festival pieces that they presented on the Congo River. Zekri says it marked one more step in integrating all of the pieces of his complex life.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Browning in Paris.
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SIMON: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.