With that groundwork laid, when the double-bill tour was proposed, Daulne wanted to take it to the next level.
"I asked [CAMI] and Martin [Perna], 'Why don't we merge the two?'" Daulne says. "Instead of just having one act go on after the other. You have to be creative today. We are four women and [Antibalas is] all men onstage; it's easy to combine that energy."
Perna, for his part, agreed.
"When they came to us with the idea of working with Zap Mama, it sounded great," he explains. "The show will begin with the four Zap Mama vocalists doing their thing — tight harmonies, improvisation and vocal grooves. A few songs in, you'll see members of Antibalas creeping on to back them up. Little by little, it will transition into our set, and we'll be joined at the end by Marie and Zap Mama plugging into our material and Marie leading Antibalas."
Besides Antibalas, another notable collaborator in Zap Mama's live show these days is ... you. Daulne recently launched what she calls the "vocal flash mob." On Zap Mama's website, Daulne makes available separated studio tracks for certain songs. She encourages audience members to learn a specific part and join in on the song live.
"I want to test [my new material], because it is a return to voices," Daulne explains. "And I want the audience to be part of it, because I have a choir part — not choir like the classical way of Western reference, it's more an ethnic choir, from the people. The only way is to ask the audience to do it, because I can't tour with a full choir with me all the time."
"It's an easy part," she adds with an air of reassurance.
If you're worried about learning your part, don't worry: Daulne is an experienced teacher.
"I don't like to use the word 'educate,'" though, she says. "I say 'opening doors of sounds and possibilities.' I do workshops for professional singers; I call that 'vocal groove.' It's like if you want to take a class of yoga; I said, 'Why don't we start a class where we can groove together as vocalists?'"
It resonates well with Antibalas' Perna, who earned a Master's of Education in 2011 and has worked as a music educator and curriculum developer.
"Teaching electronic musicians in the classroom and online made me come full circle back to the fundamental idea that music is a social thing," says Perna. "The music-making process is a growth process, and if you spend all of your time in front of a laptop, and never with other people, you're not going to grow and the music is going to lack depth."
Zap Mama has two new albums in the hopper — one ready for release soon — and Daulne has other projects on the docket as well. Besides facilitating her vocal grooves, she's featured in a French animated film, based on Roy Lewis's book The Evolution Man, Or, How I Ate My Father, to be released internationally this year.
Members of Antibalas are featured on the soundtrack of the new movie Mortdecai ("I don't know if the film will be good, but the music is slammin'," Perna notes), and Perna says the band is hoping to record this year, since this tour's material is all unrecorded.
If Daulne has her way, perhaps there will be a collaborative album coming out of all this, too.
"Maybe with the fact that we're out together with Antibalas, we can end with recording together, an album," she says. "Nobody has really confirmed anything, but the energy's so wonderful. I know it's going to be fantastic. From there, maybe it can be a record."
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story used the inaccurate term "instrumental" to describe Antibalas, a group that includes a full complement of rhythm-section and wind instruments but also often features vocals.