Zouk music and dancing gains popularity in US

NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla.: Brazilian zouk dancing gains popularity in US | Celebrities | ADN.com: "Zouk music began in the West Indies in the early 1980s. The band Kassav is widely credited with creating the first popular zouk songs. The group was formed in Paris and combined traditional Caribbean rhythms like gwo ka beats from Guadalupe, Haitian compas and Trinidadian calypso with synthesizers and drum machines. The word "zouk" is Antillean French Creole and means "party." The music quickly spread throughout the Caribbean and could also be heard on radios in northern Brazil. There, another music craze was taking place: Lambada and what would become known as the "forbidden dance" for its close, sensuous twirls and hip movements. By the early 1990s, however, lambada music had begun to fade. Adapting what they heard on the radio, Brazilians began dancing lambada-style moves to the slower-paced zouk music trickling in from their neighbors to the north. "The music kind of died out," Chris McGowan, author of "The Brazilian Sound," said of lambada. "But the dance lived on."..."

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