On their 2010 masterpiece Distant Relatives, Nas and Damian Marley sampled a range of artists from the African continent. "Friends" was notable for its use of a vocal sample to set the tone: "Mkulukulu ki menemene kiango ma puto/ nxi mukanu di lola vu maku," sings the voice in Kimbundu, lyrics that recall small moments from childhood: brushing one's teeth, playing with tires outside. The song is a response to David Zé’s "Udenge Uami," and one of the album's standout moments. Where Zé 's tone is somber, Distant Relatives seizes the moment to impart wisdom: "your real friends won't do you wrong, real friends don't change," sings Marley.
Zé 's full name was David Gabriel José Ferreira. Born in Angola in 1944 and raised by parents who were members of a Methodist church choir, he went on to become one of the country's definitive stars, a voice so powerful that the government wanted it gone. He began his career under Portuguese colonial rule, blending semba, merengue, rumba, and bolero into politically charged music that challenged colonialism and championed a new Angolan national identity.
After independence in 1975, he was embraced by the MPLA government and appointed Director of Music in the Culture Ministry, performing at independence celebrations across Lusophone Africa. He was kidnapped on May 27, 1977, alongside fellow musicians Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes, and subsequently murdered in the chaotic aftermath of a failed coup against President Agostinho Neto by his interior minister, Nito Alves. No official account of Zé's death has ever been given. His family survived by migrating to Portugal.
His celebrated 1975 album Mutudi Ua Ufolo/Viúva Da Liberdade cemented his place in the golden era of Angolan music, and it was then banned from radio for over a decade following his death. It was a deliberate strategy: the growing popularity of MPLA's musicians had begun to eclipse that of its leaders, but this burial of its legacy was reversed in the post-civil war period, restoring Zé to his rightful place as one of Angola's most important cultural figures.
Mutudi Ua Ufolo/Viúva Da Liberdade received its first proper release in 2025, in time for the 50th anniversary of its debut. Olivier Rosset of the "technology-native music group" Sounds Like Now spoke to OkayAfrica about the multi-year work of getting the album ready, from tracking down Zé's family for the proper rights to working from degraded recordings because no master file existed.
War is pervasive like that. It wipes out critical bits of memory, sacrifices heritage as a prerequisite for the success of the nationalist project, snatches collective identity from beneath our feet, and leaves nothing in the room that looks, sounds, or vaguely reminds us of our greatness.
Rosset, a French music entrepreneur, founder of Chronowax and co-founder of Official.fm, is also a notable crate digger. He lives in Lisbon now, but spent a good twenty years in Los Angeles. "I discovered music that I'd never heard before when I was living in America, which was music from Angola," he tells us.
In Portugal, he found more records, one of which was Zé's 1975 rarity. He knew the artist from the Distant Relatives recording and started digging further into the man and the myth, which led him to the fuller story. He set about tracking the family down, got in touch with Angolan national radio, and tried reaching people who might know more about the record. "I couldn't find anyone, and no one wanted to talk to me," he recalls.
Bits of information started trickling in. No one in Angola wanted anything to do with the record, he was told. The late President José Eduardo dos Santos' government had done a number on the national psyche, and it was only around 2017 — when his iron grip was finally unclenched by President João Lourenço — that Zé's name was publicly embraced again.
Rosset was still struggling to find a family member when a chance encounter with a newspaper article about the events of May 27, 1977, provided a way in. He contacted the organizers of an accompanying exhibition, the Victims of 27 May Association, a group that represents those affected. They were generous with their time and information.
"Of course, we know his brother," they told him, and offered to put him in touch with the family, who were in town for the exhibition. "I got super lucky. I went to their place and met his family, who are very important in Angola," says Rosset.
He quickly uncovered other layers and learned of the complex, multifaceted person that Zé was. These stories shaped his approach to the reissue. The songs carry a post-independence glee, if briefly. Sung in a mix of Kimbundu and Portuguese, tracks like the album opener "Mama Ku Dile - Mamã Não Chores," "Ngongo Mua Ngola - Sofrimento Em Angola" (which sounds notably like a reprise of "Udenge Uami"), "Tribalismo - Katungu," and "A Luta Continua - O Nvunda Ki Ia Bue Lua" feel ominous in retrospect — celebratory music with dark, menacing clouds already gathering on the horizon.
They sound great, which raises the question of how Rosset went about finding the masters and preparing new mixes for the re-release. Something in his expression shifts, as though the memory of sleepless nights has been unlocked.
"We didn't have the master. This album was recorded in one night at the National Radio of Angola, using Soviet recording equipment that had a metallic sound—lots of reverb, probably due to how the studio was set up. We spent three to four months on music restoration alone. We tried different software, compared the best of them," he says.
They also did stem splitting — separating a mixed audio track into its individual components, such as vocals, drums, bass, and other instruments, so each could be edited, remixed, or processed independently — then brought the individual tracks into a '70s-era outboard mixing desk for warmth and a vintage feel.
"Most of the vinyl records we found had a scratch on them. So we took seventeen copies of the record to find one that wasn't scratched, and sent that one to three different places in Europe to be cleaned with ultrasound and other techniques. After that, we worked with a studio in France to encode it and produce the first master copy. We split all the stems and rebuilt everything. We threw them into an AI software," he says.
Though he didn't disclose it in the interview, Sounds Like Now received a grant from ElevenLabs, an "AI research and product company specializing in advanced voice generation, text-to-speech, and voice cloning technology."
He continues: "Because David Zé's voice wasn't consistent throughout the record, with some parts drowned out by the room reverb, we recreated his voice, and created two different tracks of his voice that we then placed beneath the original."
It was a painstaking undertaking that required meticulous, knowledgeable people at every step. But Rosset isn't complaining.
"I was so impressed by his writing, his melodies. Even without understanding the lyrics at the beginning, I could tell he was an incredible songwriter. I got really lucky," he says. "I got truly obsessed with this record. There were so many stories around it. And the music is beautiful."
