Zaz doesn’t do things by halves on stage, as we saw in 2019 at the Bell Centre. On Tuesday, at Place des Arts, we did not find ourselves in front of a singer doused in chamomile, but in front of a real tornado. For two hours, she displayed crazy energy, most often contagious.
The French singer expressed her desire to shake up the Wilfrid-Pelletier room from the start of her concert. After entering the audience singing a sweet song, Happy Days, she was hoisted onto the stage and shouted “stand up! standing ! » to his admirers who until then were well seated in their armchairs. Then, she sang Imagine, one of those positive anthems which are the mark of this artist who enchants by encouraging us to embrace life.
To say that Zaz was expected is an understatement: the concerts she gave in recent days in Quebec (Sherbrooke, Quebec, Trois-Rivières, etc.) were to take place in the fall of 2022. They were postponed since the French singer was not vaccinated against COVID-19, which was still a necessary condition to enter the country last year. Thus, it is an artist at the end of her tour that we were able to see on stage: a singer in full possession of her means in a show set up like clockwork and delivered with an aplomb which sometimes seemed like haste.
Zaz had slowed down the pace on his album Isa, released two years ago. However, there was not much of this sweetness left on Tuesday at Place des Arts. In fact, whether they were imbued with nostalgia like If ever I forget or a sunny optimism like Qué vendra, almost all the pieces were performed with an eagerness that rarely allowed emotion to unfold.
Excited, the singer paced the stage, jumping and shouting, lining up the songs in blocks: folk-pop, gypsy jazz there, pop-rock further on. Along the way, she dug into all her albums, giving pride of place to the most recent (De Couleurs Vieux, Tout là-haut, etc.), but also bringing out her covers of Piaf (Dans ma rue and, as a reminder, La vie in pink), Comme çi comme ça and, at the end of the program, his great anthems On ira and I want, which the audience took up with a smile on their lips.
The momentum was strong, but was not always smooth. The last third of the concert dragged on before Zaz released his two big hits to finish strong. A song in homage to Quebec (“I would like to die at the edge of a lake/Going to a large tabarnac”, says the chorus) was not convincing either. Let’s give Zaz his due: his coronation was well delivered, with the right accent.
Throughout the concert, we felt a gap between the bomb of energy that was on stage and an enthusiastic audience, certainly, but also satisfied with its comfort. The energy did not always flow from the room to the stage and the singer seemed to seek to compensate for this lack by giving more of herself, even if it meant always remaining in full-throttle mode and losing nuances in her interpretations.
Zaz only seemed to settle down at one point, at the start of the encore. She sang Le chant des grives, a lovely song from her latest album. In a voice that is still strong, but very inhabited. We would have had more moments like this. Perhaps she will show a little more restraint during her last concert on Quebec soil, Wednesday, at the same place.