A profile of the Tunisian-French singer, whose many musical influences saw her to seek the services of Adrian Sherwood in search of a defining sound: Samia Farah was born on August 2nd 1971 in Tunisia. As in other years, her father, bursar at the University Village of Paris, and her mother, a nurse, were spending their holidays back in Tunisia. The couple had been resident in France since the 1970s, but their families still lived in Tunisia and Samia often returned there. At the age of 16, she decided to take a break from her studies to spend a few months back in Tunisia, as a temporary refuge for a teenager in search of an identity. There, among other things, she discovered reggae. Her father had always been a music lover, listening freely and extravagantly to everything from jazz to European and Arab classics, albeit with a certain preference for the Egyptian crooner Muhammad Abdul Wahab, known as the supreme modernizer and the first artist to prove that Western and Eastern cultures are compatible. So Samia's ear travelled freely from one world to another. Back in France, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone caught Samia's attention and gave her an idea of what is meant by vocal style. Then came rap and ragga and she experimented with their broken phrasing in the female group Mama Benz. Gradually, she developed her own style somewhere between the velvet timbre of jazz singers and the staggered flow of hip-hop - a style that doesn't force you to yell, that lets you say stuff calmly