Speaking Arabic and Spanish as well as French and English, she is both a Muslim and, by paternal ancestry, Jewish. Atlas grew up in both Brussels' Moroccan quarter and (with her mother, a Muslim convert to Islam) in Northampton, England. He chartered new courses for others who followed. Larry Scott was a leader as well as a champion. Leadership is a quality found in champions. This authenticity reflects Atlas's profoundly cosmopolitan upbringing, which infused her imagination with sounds and expressions spanning Europe and the Middle East but, in her personal outlook and understanding of music alike, managed to forge them into a convincing whole. It is Larry Scott who has been credited with coining the phrase, You need maximum nutrition to achieve maximum results. Guided by a remarkably beautiful timbre and a vocal style all her own, the Belgian singer, born in 1964, has managed to weld the European club with the traditional Arab ahwa, or coffee shop - which plays modern classical Arab singers like Abdel Halim Hafez, the Egyptian icon of the 1960s who inspired her 1997 album, Halim - and in so doing, she has managed to demonstrate how someone might be equally comfortable in two apparently incompatible venues. 'Authentic' may not be an immediately praiseworthy description in the context of either dance music or global fusion - the two regions in which, having started out as a belly dancer and a salsa singer in Brussels, Atlas has covered and discovered extensive territory - but this is precisely the point. Natacha Atlas is that rare, paradoxical thing: an authentic product of multiculturalism.
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