The tradition
Zouk is a musical movement and dance pioneered by the French Antillean band Kassav' in the early 1980s. It was originally characterized by a fast tempo (120–145 bpm), a percussion-driven rhythm, and a loud horn section. Musicians from Martinique and Guadeloupe eventually added MIDI instrumentation to their compas style, which developed into a genre called zouk-love. Zouk-love is effectively the French Lesser Antilles' compas, and it gradually became indistinguishable from compas.¶
Zouk béton
The original fast carnival style of zouk, best represented by the band Kassav', became known as "zouk béton", "zouk chiré", or "zouk hard". Zouk béton is considered a synthesis of various French Antillean dance music styles of the 20th century, including kadans, konpa, and biguine.¶
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Zouk”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶
zouk is music genre, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.1¶
The source record links this tradition to 17 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.1¶
Sources
0 claims and 0 timeline entries on this page draw on 1 sources, deduplicated by publisher.
| Source | Type | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Wikidata: zouk (Q227045) | database | Wikidata |
Do you practise or teach zouk?
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