The Sound Board Was His Springboard
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But the adventure didn’t end there: The great Algerian rai singer Khaled heard the album and was so impressed that he enlisted Funk Essentials leader Lati Kronlund and Zerang to produce half the songs on his latest album, Kenza, out now on Ark 21. There are also plans for the band to back Khaled on a major European tour this fall.
Zerang, 35, has been playing with a family band called Kismet since he was eight years old. His Assyrian father, Edward, moved with his family to Chicago from Baghdad when he was 17; he married Suzy Yona, the daughter of family friends back home, several years later. A longtime music fan and an amateur percussionist, he was familiar with numerous regional strains of Middle Eastern music, and his four sons grew up amid those sounds. In the 70s he began playing picnics and weddings with young Paul, who performed on an old Farfisa organ that had been modified to play the quarter tones of Arabic scales.
Meanwhile Doolittle signed a distribution deal with the Chicago industrial-rock label Slipdisc, which in turn had a distribution deal with the Polygram subsidiary Mercury Records. In November 1998 the band–which by then had replaced original drummer Kevin O’Donnell with Sean Fogarty–entered an Atlanta recording studio with producer (and former Georgia Satellites front man) Dan Baird and a $55,000 budget. That month they cut the basic tracks and did overdubs, to which they say Doolittle president Jeff Cole reacted enthusiastically. They then flew to Los Angeles to mix the album with hotshot Jim Scott, who’s worked with Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, and Wilco.
