Amina, like so many of the stars of North African music that call Paris home, is a singer that defies categorization. Born in Tunisia, arriving in Paris at the age of 12, she studied music both at the Paris Conservatory and at home where her mother, a singer, fancied an eclectic mix of Oum Kalthoum, French Chanson, James Brown, and the singer that would later become Amina's idol, Billie Holiday. Shaped by both her mother's musical variety and Paris' unique dynamic diversity, Amina has built a reputation with a sensual and tender voice that seems at ease floating between the worlds of drum and bass, jungle, North African Rai, Asian, and traditional West African beats.

She burst on the European musical scene in 1989 with the album Yalil (Philips France/Mango US) and an entry into the Eurovision Song Contest ("Le dernier qui a parle," "The last to speak"). She quickly followed with a second album, Wa Di Ye (Philips 1992), which became an instant hit in France, elevating her to the top of the country's dynamic North African music scene. From there, she took a seven-year break between albums. "I didn't stop for an instant," she explains. "I've been working on films, researching new sounds, and I started a family. If I had to chose between my art and my family, I would always choose the latter."

However, looking at her dossier, it is quite evident that she has managed to achieve the best of both worlds. Over the past decade, she has appeared in films, worked on film scores, and collaborated with a staggering number of the world's musical giants, who no-doubt have fallen in love with Amina's sensual and dynamic voice. While casual American listeners may fall into the trap of thinking of the Tunisian born singer as someone confined to heavily produced North African/Europop, looking more deeply into her work reveals a completely different side. She has lent her voice to albums from Afrika Bambata, Wasis Diop, Manu Dibango, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Lenny Kravitz. One of her most ambitious projects was an African jazz foray on the critically acclaimed collaboration between Hank Jones and Cheick Tidiane Seck. She has even delved into acting with a role in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Sheltering Sky." Her 1999 release, Annabi follows her eclectic musical path, bouncing between French and Arabic, dabbling in English, blending hip hop, jungle, gnawa, and reggae into her musical soup, or as she describes it, "a pioneering effort in the fusion of Musique d'Orient et D'Occident (eastern and western music)." Indeed.

Contributed by: Dan Rosenberg