ZASKA: How Dublin’s Collaborative Soul Scene Found Its Own Groove

There are bands built around a fixed lineup, bands built around a singer, and bands whose identity depends on the chemistry of a few musicians who remain together for years. ZASKA belongs to a different category. From the beginning, guitarist, composer, producer and musical director Max Zaska imagined the project as something closer to a meeting place: a flexible ensemble in which musicians and singers could move through the music without weakening its identity. That distinction explains much of what makes ZASKA important within contemporary Irish music. The project is unmistakably connected to jazz, but it is equally comfortable with neo-soul, funk, R&B and pop. It can accommodate tightly arranged horns, elastic grooves, intricate guitar figures and singers with radically different personalities because ZASKA’s continuity does not depend on one voice standing at the front. It depends on Max Zaska’s ability to create a framework in which collaboration itself becomes part of the composition.

That idea reached its clearest early expression on It Takes a Village, ZASKA’s debut album, released in February 2019. More than twenty-five performers contributed to the record, including musicians connected to Wyvern Lingo, Loah, BARQ, Little Green Cars, Super Silly, Come On Live Long, Booka Brass Band and other corners of Ireland’s increasingly interconnected independent scene. Max Zaska described the record as a concept album about community, drawing a parallel between the birth of his first child and the process of bringing an album into existence with the help of other people. The title was therefore not a convenient metaphor attached after the music was finished. It described the method behind the project. ZASKA had become a band whose most stable characteristic was its openness to other musicians.

To understand why that approach mattered, it is useful to look beyond the usual question of genre. ZASKA is often described through combinations of neo-soul, modern funk, indie jazz and R&B, all of which are accurate without being sufficient. Max Zaska’s real contribution lies in the way those languages are organized around people. The guitar may be central, but it rarely demands that every arrangement become a guitar showcase. The horns can be intricate without turning the music into an exercise in jazz sophistication. Vocalists are given enough space to bring their own identities into the songs. Rhythm sections are expected to groove, but the groove is not merely decorative. Each element participates in a larger arrangement whose purpose is to make individual personalities sound connected.

In that sense, It Takes a Village was more than ZASKA’s debut. It was a portrait of an Irish musical community learning how much it could accomplish by working across the borders that normally separate scenes.

Max Zaska Before ZASKA

Max Zaska’s path toward this kind of ensemble began with the guitar. He grew up partly in Bray, County Wicklow, and developed as a musician in an environment where jazz education and the social networks surrounding live music could intersect. He eventually earned a degree in jazz performance, acquiring the technical foundation that would become important to ZASKA without allowing formal jazz language to determine the limits of the project. Later descriptions of his work by Ireland’s Improvised Music Company would characterize him as a guitarist, songwriter, musical director and producer whose music combines neo-soul, modern funk and indie jazz. That sequence of roles is revealing. Zaska is not simply a guitarist who happens to write songs. The broader architecture of a performance—who plays, how parts interact, where voices enter and how the ensemble changes character—is central to his musical identity.

One of the most frequently repeated details from ZASKA’s early history is the presence of Andrew Hozier-Byrne. Long before Hozier became internationally famous, he sang in an early version of Zaska’s band. More recent accounts of Max Zaska’s career still identify that connection as part of the project’s origins, while Zaska himself continued developing a musical network that would ultimately become much larger than any single collaboration. The significance of the Hozier connection is therefore not that ZASKA should be understood retrospectively as “the band Hozier was once in.” It demonstrates something more useful: Max Zaska was already building environments in which distinctive young Irish musicians could meet before many of them became widely known.

This distinction becomes increasingly important as the story develops. Hozier’s later success could easily overshadow an account of ZASKA if treated as the central event, but the real pattern is broader. ZASKA repeatedly brought singers, instrumentalists and songwriters into the same orbit. Some appeared briefly, some returned, and others became part of different projects elsewhere in the Irish scene. Instead of treating turnover as instability, Max Zaska made rotation one of the group’s defining principles.

That decision changed what a “band” could mean.

Dublin as an Incubator

ZASKA emerged at a particularly fertile moment for Irish independent music. Dublin’s musical ecosystem was becoming increasingly difficult to divide into simple genre categories. Jazz-trained instrumentalists could work with soul singers, electronic producers, hip-hop artists and indie bands; musicians might appear in several ensembles whose audiences would once have been considered separate. The city’s scale encouraged overlap. Rather than operating inside enormous self-contained industries, artists repeatedly encountered one another in venues, rehearsals, sessions and collaborative projects.

ZASKA did not create this ecosystem, but the project became one of its clearest manifestations.

The personnel surrounding It Takes a Village make that visible. Loah brought a highly individual relationship with soul, folk and songwriting. Members of Wyvern Lingo came from a vocal-centered world in which R&B and pop could coexist with intricate harmony. BARQ represented another route through soul, funk and alternative music. Musicians associated with Little Green Cars, Super Silly, Come On Live Long and Booka Brass Band expanded the network further. More than a guest list, the record became evidence that these scenes were already connected beneath the surface.

The community surrounding ZASKA also challenged a persistent assumption about jazz-related music: that complexity and accessibility must pull in opposite directions. Max Zaska’s arrangements can contain sophisticated harmony, tightly coordinated rhythmic figures and carefully constructed horn writing, yet the music often remains immediate. Groove provides an entry point. Vocals provide personality. Arrangement creates depth for listeners who return.

That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds. Musicians with extensive training can be tempted to make complexity audible as proof of sophistication. ZASKA usually works differently. The knowledge is embedded inside the structure. A chord can be unusual without announcing itself as unusual. A rhythmic displacement can create momentum without requiring the listener to count it. Horn lines can be precise while still serving the song.

Jazz becomes a method rather than a restriction.

Guitar at the Center Without Taking Over

This is especially clear in Max Zaska’s guitar playing. Because the project bears his name, it would be easy to imagine ZASKA as a guitarist’s vehicle surrounded by singers and a rhythm section. The recordings resist that interpretation. Zaska certainly has the technique to dominate an arrangement, but his more distinctive skill is placement.

Neo-soul and modern funk demand a different conception of guitar from the heroic soloing associated with much rock and fusion. A guitarist may contribute a clipped rhythmic figure, a sequence of extended chords, a counterline against the vocal or a carefully timed accent that becomes important precisely because it does not occupy much space. The instrument works inside the groove.

This requires restraint as much as virtuosity.

Max Zaska’s jazz background gives him access to a broad harmonic vocabulary, but the project’s identity depends on translating that vocabulary into songs. Chords are not interesting because they are complicated; they are interesting because they change the emotional color surrounding a voice. Rhythmic figures are not there to demonstrate precision; they interact with bass and drums to create movement.

This approach also helps explain why ZASKA can accommodate different singers. A heavily dominant instrumental identity might force every vocalist into the same musical role. Zaska instead creates arrangements flexible enough to respond to contrasting voices.

The singer changes.

The musical world remains recognizable.

Hozier and “In Your Own Sweet Time”

The early collaboration with Hozier provides a useful example of this flexibility. Hozier appeared on “In Your Own Sweet Time,” a ZASKA recording that predates the singer’s international breakthrough. Hearing that collaboration retrospectively is tempting because Hozier’s later career gives every early recording an aura of prophecy. But the more revealing perspective is to hear it as part of a local musical network before fame rearranged the hierarchy.

At that stage, Hozier was one talented singer among musicians developing their identities in Ireland. ZASKA provided a context in which a voice like his could enter a groove-centered arrangement without requiring the entire project to become a singer-songwriter vehicle.

That pattern would continue long after Hozier left the group.

The important legacy of the collaboration is therefore structural. Max Zaska had learned early that a strong vocalist did not have to become the permanent identity of the band. A singer could arrive, transform a composition and leave behind something distinctive while the project continued.

For ZASKA, collaboration was not a compromise between individual artists.

It was the format.

From Band to Collective

As the project developed, this rotating structure became increasingly deliberate. Describing ZASKA as a “supergroup” captures the concentration of talent but can also be misleading because supergroups are normally built around famous musicians whose individual reputations precede the ensemble. ZASKA operated almost in reverse. It became a platform through which a network of musicians could become more visible collectively.

The distinction between band and collective matters here. A traditional band often derives identity from continuity of personnel. Change the singer or rhythm section and listeners may feel that the essential group has disappeared. ZASKA’s continuity resides primarily in Max Zaska’s compositions, arrangements, guitar language and collaborative philosophy. The personnel can change because change has been incorporated into the design.

This gives the project unusual resilience.

It also places greater responsibility on the musical director. When the same musicians play together for years, ensemble chemistry develops partly through repetition. A rotating collective requires another skill: creating enough structural clarity that new personalities can enter without making the music incoherent.

Max Zaska became increasingly adept at precisely that.

The Road to It Takes a Village

By the time the debut album began taking shape, the idea of community was no longer theoretical. The record required it. More than twenty-five musicians participated, and the sessions involved several recording locations and a substantial network of vocalists and instrumentalists. Max Zaska wrote the music and lyrics except where collaborators were credited, produced the record, wrote the horn arrangements and developed the broader arrangements and album concept with James Smith, who served as executive producer. The basic instrumental tracks were recorded principally at Hellfire Studios in Dublin, with additional work taking place elsewhere before mixing and mastering completed the project.

The scale of the undertaking makes the album’s title almost literal. No single musician could embody everything Max Zaska wanted the project to contain. Rather than view that dependence as a weakness, he turned it into the theme.

He had also recently become a father. Zaska explained that the album’s concept paralleled the birth of his first child with the “birth” of the record and the community necessary for both experiences. That personal dimension prevents It Takes a Village from becoming merely a showcase for the Dublin scene. Community here is not an abstract cultural slogan. It concerns dependence, responsibility and the recognition that major things in life rarely happen alone.

The concept also mirrors the practical reality of independent music. Albums are often narrated through the mythology of individual genius: the songwriter has a vision and everyone else helps realize it. ZASKA offers a more porous model. Max remains the project’s central architect, but the personalities of the collaborators are part of the intended result.

The village is not background.

It is audible.

A Record Built Around Voices

This becomes especially important when considering the singers. Rather than search for one vocalist capable of representing every emotional register, ZASKA allows different voices to inhabit different songs. That decision changes the experience of listening to the album. The record does not present a single protagonist moving through twelve variations of the same identity. It feels more like entering a community in which different people step forward.

For some bands, that degree of vocal rotation would fragment the album.

For ZASKA, it creates the concept.

The continuity comes from arrangements, rhythmic language and Max Zaska’s writing. Funk and neo-soul supply a shared vocabulary, while jazz provides flexibility in how that vocabulary can be manipulated. Horns recur as architectural elements. Guitar connects harmonic and rhythmic layers. Bass and drums create the physical center. The voices provide changing perspectives.

This is one reason the word “collective” describes ZASKA more accurately than conventional genre labels alone.

The project is not merely neo-soul played by jazz musicians.

It is music organized around exchange.

Why Groove Matters

The word “groove” can become dangerously vague in music criticism. It is often used as a substitute for describing what musicians are actually doing. In ZASKA’s case, however, groove is fundamental because it creates common ground between musical languages.

Jazz harmony can coexist with R&B vocals because rhythm connects them.

Funk guitar can coexist with sophisticated horn writing because rhythm connects them.

Pop song structures can accommodate improvisational personalities because rhythm connects them.

Groove is therefore not simply the pleasurable surface of the music. It is organizational.

Max Zaska understands that a collective containing many musicians needs a strong center. The more varied the personalities, the more important it becomes to establish musical conditions in which they can communicate immediately. Rhythm provides those conditions.

This does not mean everything must remain locked to an inflexible beat. The best groove-oriented musicians understand that time is elastic. Notes can sit slightly ahead of or behind the beat. Bass and drums can create tension through microscopic differences in placement. Guitar can function almost like percussion. Horns can reinforce the groove or deliberately cut across it.

The listener may not analyze these relationships consciously.

The body understands them first.

Irish Neo-Soul Without Imitation

ZASKA also arrived at a moment when neo-soul had become an international language. The genre’s foundations were deeply connected to American artists and traditions, from classic soul and funk through the innovations associated with the 1990s and early 2000s. For musicians elsewhere, the challenge was how to engage with that vocabulary without simply reproducing its most recognizable surfaces.

ZASKA’s answer was to localize the process through people.

The music did not need to sound “Irish” through obvious traditional motifs in order to possess an Irish identity. Its Irishness existed in the community creating it: the singers, instrumentalists, venues, friendships and collaborations surrounding the project.

That is a more meaningful form of localization than attaching a superficial national marker to imported musical language.

Dublin becomes present because the musicians are present.

The scene enters the record through relationships.

The Album as a Social Map

Seen from this perspective, It Takes a Village can be heard almost as a map of a musical ecosystem. Follow one vocalist outward and another project appears. Follow a horn player or rhythm-section musician and another connection emerges. ZASKA sits at the center not because Max Zaska controls the entire scene, but because his project has repeatedly created opportunities for those paths to cross.

Accounts surrounding the album’s release emphasized precisely this collaborative character. Musicians involved in the project described the Irish scene as unusually supportive, with artists learning from one another and participating in each other’s work. The record gave that informal network a concrete form.

This helps explain why the album matters beyond its individual tracks. A debut record normally introduces an artist.

It Takes a Village introduced an artist by introducing everyone around him.

That inversion is central to ZASKA’s identity.

The Beginning Rather Than the Destination

The 2019 album would establish the foundation for what followed. ZASKA continued working with rotating collaborators, while Max Zaska expanded his role as producer, writer and musical director. The project would eventually move toward the socially and environmentally conscious themes of A Better Way, released in 2022, while later live recordings documented how the ensemble changed across different lineups and years. The underlying philosophy remained remarkably consistent: collaboration was not a phase surrounding the debut album. It was the mechanism through which ZASKA evolved.

That makes It Takes a Village an ideal starting point for understanding Max Zaska. The album does not ask us to imagine a solitary composer constructing a musical universe and inviting others inside after the fact. It shows a musician whose universe exists because other people enter it.

The distinction is subtle but decisive.

ZASKA’s achievement is not simply the fusion of jazz, funk, soul and R&B. Those combinations already possess long histories. What gives the project its particular character is the social architecture surrounding the music: a guitarist willing to remain at the center without demanding that every spotlight point toward him, singers who can bring radically different identities into the same project, instrumentalists moving between Dublin’s interconnected scenes, and arrangements strong enough to hold those differences together.

In 2019, It Takes a Village gave that architecture a name.

The next question was what Max Zaska could do once the village had been built.

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It Takes a Village: When Dublin’s Music Scene Became the Band

The title It Takes a Village describes more than the number of musicians gathered around Max Zaska. It explains how the album works. Released in 2019, ZASKA’s debut does not behave like a conventional record built around one singer, one instrumental personality or one stable ensemble. Instead, it moves through different voices while maintaining a recognizable musical center. Across the record, Max Zaska acts as composer, guitarist, arranger, producer and musical director, but the most important aspect of that leadership is his willingness to leave space for other personalities. The album features an extensive cast drawn from Ireland’s interconnected soul, jazz, R&B, funk and independent scenes, including collaborators associated with Wyvern Lingo, BARQ, Super Silly, Little Green Cars, Come On Live Long and Booka Brass Band. Its diversity could easily have produced the feeling of a compilation. What prevents that fragmentation is the strength of Zaska’s musical architecture.

The songs share a rhythmic intelligence that makes stylistic differences feel like variations within the same world. Guitar rarely behaves as a dominant solo instrument. Horns are integrated into arrangements rather than added as decoration. Bass and drums carry enormous responsibility, creating grooves flexible enough to support different vocal personalities without forcing them into a standardized approach. Extended harmony enters naturally because the musicians understand it as part of the song rather than as evidence of sophistication. This is where Max Zaska’s jazz education becomes most valuable: not in obvious demonstrations of jazz vocabulary, but in his ability to organize complex musical information so that it remains immediate.

The Village Has Many Voices

Using multiple lead singers creates one of the album’s most obvious risks. Popular music has trained listeners to associate a band with a voice. Even when instrumental personnel change, the singer frequently provides continuity. ZASKA reverses that logic. Voices change because change itself is part of the concept.

This allows each singer to inhabit a song rather than merely interpret a part originally designed for a permanent front person. Different vocal timbres alter the emotional temperature of the arrangements. A lighter voice may encourage greater instrumental transparency; a more forceful singer can push the rhythm section toward another kind of intensity. Instead of neutralizing these differences, Max Zaska builds around them. The songs retain his compositional identity while accepting the personalities of the performers who enter them.

That is one reason the collective format feels organic rather than strategic. Guest-heavy albums can sometimes resemble exercises in networking, with recognizable names attached to individual tracks to expand an artist’s audience. It Takes a Village is structurally dependent on collaboration. Remove the changing voices and the concept itself changes.

The singers are not visitors to ZASKA’s music.

For the duration of each song, they are ZASKA.

“Can’t Shake the Feeling” and the Strength of a Song

One of the clearest demonstrations of the project’s accessibility comes through “Can’t Shake the Feeling.” The song shows that ZASKA’s interest in sophisticated harmony and ensemble writing does not prevent direct emotional communication. The arrangement moves with the confidence of musicians who understand that complexity does not need to announce itself.

This distinction is essential. Jazz-trained musicians working in soul or pop sometimes appear caught between two audiences, as though simplicity might betray their training while too much harmonic information could alienate listeners outside jazz. ZASKA rarely treats the problem in those terms. A composition can contain intricate details while remaining memorable because the details serve the song.

The guitar is particularly instructive. Rather than occupying every open space, Max Zaska uses rhythmic placement to strengthen the larger groove. A chord becomes part of the percussion. A short melodic response can connect one vocal phrase to the next. When the arrangement expands, guitar does not automatically become louder or more dominant.

This discipline creates room for the rest of the band.

And ZASKA needs room because the music is fundamentally social.

Horns as Architecture

Horn arrangements play an important role throughout Max Zaska’s work, and their function reveals another connection with jazz tradition. In weaker soul and funk arrangements, horns can become punctuation marks: short bursts added at predictable moments to make a chorus feel larger. ZASKA tends to think about them more structurally.

A horn section can answer a vocal melody, create counterpoint, reinforce rhythm or change the harmonic character of a passage. Because Zaska writes and arranges with an ensemble perspective, the horns participate in the composition rather than simply decorating it.

This approach has deep precedents across jazz, soul and funk. From big-band arranging to the tightly organized sections of James Brown’s groups and the orchestral sophistication of 1970s soul, horns have often functioned simultaneously as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic instruments. ZASKA inherits that history without trying to reproduce a particular decade.

The result feels contemporary because the arrangements are built around the musicians available to him.

Again, community determines sound.

The Rhythm Section as Common Language

If changing vocalists provide the album’s variety, rhythm supplies continuity. Neo-soul, funk, jazz and R&B all place different demands on groove, but the strongest musicians within those traditions share an understanding that rhythm is not simply a metronomic grid.

A groove depends on relationships.

Where does the bass sit against the kick drum? How long does a guitarist allow a chord to ring? Does a snare accent feel slightly relaxed or sharply forward? How do horns enter around the vocal without disrupting momentum?

These are small decisions with enormous consequences.

ZASKA’s music benefits from musicians capable of treating such questions instinctively. The rhythmic language can therefore remain detailed without becoming rigid. Repetition creates stability, but small variations keep the music alive.

This is one of the strongest bridges between jazz and neo-soul in the project. Jazz contributes not merely harmonic vocabulary but a culture of listening. Musicians react to one another. Even when a part has been arranged, its execution can remain responsive.

Groove becomes collective improvisation at microscopic scale.

Dublin Without the Postcard

There is an important geographical dimension to It Takes a Village, but ZASKA’s Irish identity does not depend on conventional symbols of Irish music. There is no need to insert traditional instrumentation into every arrangement or quote folk melodies simply to establish where the record comes from.

Dublin is present through the musicians.

This is a more interesting form of regional identity. Cities often develop recognizable musical cultures not because every artist shares a genre, but because musicians repeatedly work together. A drummer moves from a jazz session to an R&B project. A singer appears with an electronic producer and later collaborates with a funk band. Horn players move between ensembles. Friendships become sessions; sessions become new bands.

Over time, those connections create a local vocabulary.

ZASKA is especially useful for understanding this process because Max Zaska repeatedly gathers musicians who might otherwise be discussed separately. His project turns the network into an audible ensemble.

The Dublin represented by It Takes a Village is therefore not a visual location.

It is a set of relationships.

The Importance of Loah

Among the artists connected to this broader Irish scene, Loah represents particularly well the difficulty of separating contemporary musicians into clean categories. Her work has drawn on soul, folk, jazz and multiple cultural influences, developing a voice that does not fit neatly inside conventional genre boundaries.

That makes her a natural presence in the ZASKA universe.

The important element is not simply that Max Zaska invited a respected singer onto a track. It is that both artists share a willingness to treat genre as material rather than identity. A song can contain soul phrasing, jazz harmony and another melodic influence without requiring the musicians to decide which category owns the result.

Collaborations like this also reveal why ZASKA’s collective model is so effective. Max does not need every singer to resemble the previous one. Difference generates interest.

The arrangement supplies continuity.

The voice supplies perspective.

BARQ, Super Silly and an Expanding Network

Other connections surrounding the album point toward the increasingly hybrid nature of Irish music during the period. BARQ combined elements of soul, rock, funk and contemporary R&B. Super Silly developed another version of groove-oriented music, while Wyvern Lingo brought sophisticated vocal harmony and R&B-inflected songwriting into the same broader ecosystem.

These groups did not constitute a formal movement with a manifesto.

That is precisely the point.

Scenes often become visible retrospectively. Musicians do not necessarily gather in a room and decide to create “the Dublin neo-soul movement.” They share stages, recommend players, collaborate, form new groups and attend one another’s performances. Audiences begin moving between projects. A network emerges before anyone decides what to call it.

It Takes a Village captures that process unusually clearly because its personnel cross so many of those paths.

The album becomes evidence of a scene without needing to declare itself a scene.

The Producer as Host

Max Zaska’s role as producer deserves attention because production in a collaborative project requires a particular kind of authority. Someone must ultimately decide what belongs on the record. Unlimited openness does not produce coherence by itself.

Zaska therefore operates simultaneously as host and editor.

He invites personalities into the project but creates boundaries around their contributions. An arrangement must still have shape. A song must still arrive somewhere. Twenty-five musicians cannot all occupy the foreground at once.

This is where musical direction becomes almost architectural.

The producer decides how much space each element receives.

Too much guitar and the collective becomes a guitarist’s album. Too many horn layers and the vocals lose intimacy. Too much rhythmic complexity and the songs may become demonstrations. Too little detail and the musicians’ capabilities are wasted.

The strongest moments on It Takes a Village occur when those balances feel effortless.

They are not effortless.

They are arranged to feel that way.

“It’s Ridiculous” and Personality Inside Precision

ZASKA’s music also benefits from a sense of playfulness. Sophisticated ensemble music can easily become overly serious, especially when critics emphasize harmonic complexity and instrumental technique. Max Zaska understands that groove-oriented music needs personality.

“It’s Ridiculous” is a useful example of the way attitude can coexist with precision. The arrangement can be tightly controlled without sounding academic because rhythm and vocal character remain central. The musicians are not asking the listener to admire how difficult the music is.

They are inviting the listener inside it.

That difference explains much of ZASKA’s accessibility.

Technical ability remains beneath the surface until the listener chooses to examine it. Someone can enjoy the track because the groove works, because the vocal is compelling or because the chorus remains memorable. Another listener can focus on harmony, guitar voicings or arrangement.

Neither experience invalidates the other.

The music functions at several depths simultaneously.

Jazz as a Way of Organizing People

This may be the most meaningful way to describe ZASKA’s relationship with jazz. Jazz appears in harmony, improvisational awareness and the training of many musicians involved, but it also appears socially.

Jazz has always depended on networks.

Musicians learn through playing with older musicians, sitting in at sessions, forming temporary ensembles, joining one another’s recording dates and carrying ideas from one group into another. The history of the music cannot be understood only through permanent bands because so much innovation occurred through changing combinations of people.

ZASKA brings that principle into a contemporary song-oriented context.

The rotating personnel are therefore not evidence that Max Zaska failed to maintain a stable band. They are evidence that he built a project capable of surviving constant renewal.

Each musician alters the music slightly.

The identity remains.

Why “Neo-Soul” Is Useful but Incomplete

Neo-soul remains one of the most convenient labels for ZASKA because the music frequently draws on the genre’s harmonic richness, groove-centered rhythm and relationship between live instrumentation and contemporary R&B songwriting. Yet the term becomes restrictive if treated as a complete explanation.

ZASKA is equally shaped by funk.

Jazz is fundamental.

Pop songwriting matters.

At times the horn writing suggests a larger ensemble tradition, while guitar vocabulary can move through several generations of rhythm-oriented playing.

The music’s identity emerges from intersection.

This is why attempts to determine whether ZASKA is “really jazz” miss the point. Genre classifications are useful for finding audiences and describing broad characteristics, but musicians rarely experience their vocabulary in such isolated compartments.

Max Zaska does not need to stop playing neo-soul when he uses a jazz chord.

He does not stop playing jazz when the audience dances.

The categories overlap because the musicians overlap.

Community as an Artistic Decision

The word “community” can become sentimental if separated from practical reality. It Takes a Village avoids that problem because collaboration required real work. Coordinating a record with more than twenty-five musicians means schedules, rehearsals, arrangements, recording sessions and decisions about how contrasting performers fit inside one project.

Community is difficult.

That difficulty gives the album’s concept weight.

The title does not imply that everyone automatically agrees or that collaboration eliminates individual ambition. It suggests that creation can depend on recognizing what other people contribute.

For Max Zaska, this became inseparable from fatherhood. The parallel between raising a child and making an album is not exact, nor does it need to be. What connects the experiences is the collapse of the fantasy of complete self-sufficiency.

Important things require other people.

The album turns that recognition into music.

An Alternative to the Genius Myth

Popular music history is frequently written around singular figures. A brilliant songwriter, singer, guitarist or producer becomes the protagonist while collaborators are reduced to supporting characters. Sometimes that structure reflects reality. Often it simplifies it.

ZASKA offers a useful alternative.

Max Zaska is clearly the project’s central figure. Without his writing, arrangements and direction, ZASKA would not exist. But his centrality does not require diminishing the musicians around him.

In fact, his identity becomes clearer through them.

A musical director can demonstrate creativity not only by producing distinctive sounds personally, but by recognizing combinations of people capable of producing something unexpected.

Duke Ellington understood this at the highest level: individual musicians were part of his compositional palette. Charles Mingus likewise wrote with personalities in mind. The comparison is not stylistic, but the principle is relevant. An ensemble leader composes partly through personnel.

Max Zaska applies that idea to a different musical world.

The village becomes part of the arrangement.

The Album That Could Only Come From a Scene

Had It Takes a Village been created by anonymous session musicians assembled solely for recording, the notes and chords might have been reproducible.

The meaning would have been different.

The album matters because its collaborators already belonged to a living network. They represented bands, friendships, shared performances and overlapping audiences. Their presence documented a particular moment in Irish independent music when the boundaries between jazz, soul, funk and alternative pop were becoming increasingly porous.

That context cannot be measured by technical complexity.

It is cultural.

ZASKA provided a place where the scene could hear itself.

The debut therefore succeeds on two levels. It establishes Max Zaska as a composer and musical director capable of controlling a large collaborative project, while simultaneously refusing to make that project entirely about him.

That apparent contradiction is the record’s strength.

After the Village

The question after a debut this collaborative was obvious: where could ZASKA go next?

Repeating the formula with another enormous cast might have produced diminishing returns. The concept had already been stated clearly. What mattered now was whether the collaborative method could support different themes and a changing musical environment.

The years following It Takes a Village would provide that test. ZASKA continued evolving as Max Zaska’s concerns broadened beyond the celebration of community toward questions of responsibility, social change and the kind of world that community inhabits. That development would become particularly visible on A Better Way, released in 2022, where collaboration remained essential but the thematic perspective expanded.

The transition makes sense.

It Takes a Village asks us to recognize that nobody creates alone.

Once that idea has been accepted, another question follows naturally.

What do we owe the people with whom we share the village?

For ZASKA, answering that question would transform a collaborative Dublin project into something broader: music in which groove, community and social consciousness could occupy the same space without sacrificing the pleasure that made the project compelling in the first place.

A Better Way and Beyond: How ZASKA Turned Collaboration Into a Musical Philosophy

If It Takes a Village established collaboration as the foundation of ZASKA, the years that followed tested whether that philosophy could survive beyond the excitement of a debut. A project built around rotating musicians faces a particular challenge: once the novelty of the collective has been established, what gives the music continuity? Max Zaska’s answer was not to stabilize the lineup or narrow the stylistic range. He moved in the opposite direction. ZASKA became increasingly open to different singers, producers, scenes and musical ideas while Max’s role as composer, guitarist, arranger and musical director provided the thread connecting them. By the time the second album, A Better Way, appeared in 2022, the collaborative model had evolved from a method of making records into something closer to an artistic philosophy. The new album retained the combination of neo-soul, modern funk, jazz and R&B that had defined the project, but its perspective expanded toward sustainability, responsibility and the possibility of building a better future. Improvised Music Company described the record as inspired partly by the contemporary UK jazz and neo-soul scene and featuring vocalists including Tolü Makay, Faye O’Rourke, Melina Malone, Jess Kav and others.

That development was logical. It Takes a Village had argued, implicitly and explicitly, that meaningful creation depends on other people. A Better Way asked what happens after that realization. Community cannot simply be celebrated; it has to decide what it values. The second ZASKA album therefore broadened the idea of responsibility from the musicians surrounding Max to the environment and society they inhabit. Yet the record did not become a lecture set to music. ZASKA remained committed to groove, melody and the pleasure of ensemble performance. Optimism became part of the musical argument. If change is possible, the music should allow listeners to feel possibility rather than merely hear about it.

A Better Way

The title A Better Way is characteristically direct. It does not promise perfection or pretend to provide solutions to enormous social and environmental problems. Instead, it suggests movement: another route can be imagined.

This distinction matters because socially conscious music can become trapped between message and experience. If the message overwhelms the music, songs risk functioning as statements first and performances second. Max Zaska’s collaborative method offers another possibility. Different singers can approach shared concerns from different emotional positions, preventing the record from collapsing into a single didactic voice.

The second album retained the rotating-vocalist structure that had become central to ZASKA. Tolü Makay, Faye O’Rourke of Soda Blonde, Melina Malone, Jess Kav and Precious Okpaje were among the singers involved, reflecting once again Max’s instinct for placing individual voices inside a coherent ensemble. Contemporary Irish jazz organization Improvised Music Company characterized the record as a hopeful expression of the possibility of improving the world for ourselves and future generations.

Hope is important here.

ZASKA’s music has rarely depended on darkness as evidence of seriousness. The groove itself carries an affirmative quality. Funk, soul and R&B have long demonstrated that music can address complicated realities while remaining physical, communal and pleasurable.

Dancing does not invalidate thought.

Sometimes it creates the space in which thought becomes shared.

Looking Toward the UK

One of the revealing developments surrounding A Better Way was ZASKA’s engagement with the contemporary UK jazz and neo-soul landscape. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, British musicians had created an internationally visible scene in which jazz interacted naturally with grime, hip-hop, Afrobeat, Caribbean music, electronic production, broken beat and soul.

For an Irish musician such as Max Zaska, this offered an important nearby example. Jazz did not have to remain culturally separated from younger audiences or contemporary popular music. It could operate inside a wider ecosystem.

ZASKA had already reached similar conclusions independently. The Dublin scene surrounding Max contained musicians who crossed between jazz, R&B, funk, hip-hop and alternative music. The British example therefore did not require ZASKA to abandon its identity. It demonstrated that this kind of porous musical culture belonged to a larger generational movement.

The relationship is best understood as inspiration rather than imitation.

ZASKA remained unmistakably rooted in Ireland because its collaborators remained central to its identity.

The Guitarist as Curator

By this stage, describing Max Zaska simply as a guitarist had become increasingly inadequate. Guitar remained fundamental to his musical vocabulary, but his larger role resembled that of a curator.

A curator does not create every object in a room.

A curator creates relationships between them.

Max’s ability to recognize singers, instrumentalists and writers who might reveal something new in his compositions became one of his defining skills. This helps explain why personnel changes rarely make ZASKA feel unstable. The project expects difference.

That philosophy also changes the meaning of leadership. Traditional bandleading can depend on establishing a strong individual identity that other musicians support. Max’s leadership is often visible through the opportunities he creates for other identities to emerge.

This is not self-erasure.

The arrangements remain his.

The guitar language remains recognizable.

The overall musical direction remains coherent.

But the leader’s personality is expressed partly through what he allows other people to contribute.

Melina Malone and the Continuing Conversation

Melina Malone became one of the important voices in ZASKA’s later collaborative network. Her presence illustrates how the project can develop relationships rather than simply accumulate guest appearances.

Malone’s background in alternative R&B fits naturally inside ZASKA’s world, but compatibility is only the beginning. The real question is what happens when a vocalist’s phrasing and emotional character encounter Max’s writing.

This is where collaboration becomes composition.

A song written for one voice may require a particular melodic shape. A song developed with another singer may evolve differently from the beginning. Once collaborators participate in writing rather than simply interpreting finished material, the boundaries of authorship become more interesting.

ZASKA increasingly embraced that openness.

The result was a project capable of changing because the people entering it were allowed to leave marks.

From the Studio Back to the Stage

ZASKA’s reputation has also depended heavily on live performance. Improvised Music Company has repeatedly described the group as a high-energy live act, and its event listings emphasize a rotating roster of musicians and rising artists rather than a permanently fixed lineup.

This matters because the collaborative concept is especially visible onstage.

A recording can hide process. Listeners hear the completed arrangement without necessarily knowing how many decisions produced it. A concert exposes relationships physically. The audience can see Max cue musicians, watch singers enter and leave the foreground, and experience how an ensemble changes character when another collaborator joins.

The energy is therefore not incidental.

It is social.

A ZASKA concert can resemble a gathering precisely because the project was conceived through gathering.

That quality links the music to older traditions of funk and jazz in which performance is not simply the reproduction of recorded material. The room participates. Musicians respond to one another, arrangements stretch, and the difference between band and audience becomes less rigid.

Paris and a New Stage of Collaboration

In 2022, another important chapter emerged during Max Zaska’s residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. According to Improvised Music Company, Max invited a series of artists—including Gemma Dunleavy, shiv, Kean Kavanagh and Melina Malone—to collaborate during the residency, with different writing partnerships developing across the month.

The importance of this project lies in its method.

Rather than arriving with a completed body of work and recruiting performers, Max used collaboration as part of the writing process itself.

That represents an evolution from It Takes a Village. The debut celebrated a community gathered around songs. The Paris work pushed further toward songs generated through encounters.

The distinction may appear subtle, but it changes the creative hierarchy.

Collaboration is no longer simply how ZASKA performs the music.

It becomes how the music begins.

WRITE RECORD PERFORM

That direction continued when Max Zaska was selected in 2023 for Improvised Music Company’s WRITE RECORD PERFORM residency with Triskel Arts Centre. The program provided time, resources and performance space to develop new work, and Max proposed a project centered once again on collaboration.

The resulting work brought together ZASKA with Gemma Dunleavy, shiv, Melina Malone and producer/artist jarjarjr. The music was described as grounded in jazz while incorporating soul, R&B, hip-hop and pop. Importantly, the project grew partly from writing sessions begun during the Paris residency.

This reveals continuity across several years.

The large collective of It Takes a Village was not an isolated experiment.

The rotating voices of A Better Way were not a marketing device.

The Paris sessions were not simply a residency opportunity.

WRITE RECORD PERFORM was not a departure.

Each represented another version of the same fundamental belief: ZASKA becomes more interesting when its borders remain open.

Jazz Beneath the Surface

The farther ZASKA moves into neo-soul, R&B and contemporary song, the more useful it becomes to reconsider what jazz means within the project.

Jazz is not always the dominant surface language.

It may instead exist in process.

Improvisation matters. Extended harmony matters. Instrumental interaction matters. But so does the assumption that musicians are individuals rather than interchangeable performers. Max’s arrangements depend on personality, and the music changes according to who enters the ensemble.

That principle belongs deeply to jazz history.

Miles Davis’s groups changed because personnel changed. Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers evolved as generations passed through the band. Duke Ellington wrote with specific instrumental voices in mind. None of these examples sounds remotely like ZASKA, but they share an understanding that an ensemble is partly composed through people.

Max applies that principle to a contemporary Irish environment shaped by soul, funk, R&B and pop.

Jazz becomes less a genre boundary than a way of thinking about musicians.

A Scene Builder

By 2025, Max Zaska’s role within Irish music had expanded again. Improvised Music Company identified him as a significant figure in the Irish neo-soul scene and documented a four-concert series he curated at The Cooler in Dublin. The program included Projective, Negro Impacto, Cooks But We’re Chefs and Jess Kav, effectively placing Max in the role of curator and scene builder as well as performer.

This development is particularly revealing because it extends the philosophy of ZASKA beyond ZASKA.

A musician who genuinely believes in community eventually faces a question: does community exist only when it contributes to his own records, or can his position be used to create space for other artists?

Curation provides an answer.

Max’s involvement in presenting other neo-soul acts suggests that the “village” metaphor of 2019 had matured into something practical. Supporting a scene can mean performing within it, but it can also mean creating stages, audiences and connections for musicians whose work deserves greater visibility.

That may ultimately prove as important as any single ZASKA album.

Irish Jazz Without a Purity Test

ZASKA also raises a useful question about how jazz institutions define contemporary music. Max Zaska holds a degree in jazz performance and remains active within Ireland’s jazz and improvised-music infrastructure, yet much of ZASKA’s music could comfortably reach listeners who rarely identify themselves as jazz fans.

This should not be considered a contradiction.

Jazz has always changed through contact.

Soul jazz, jazz-funk, fusion, acid jazz and countless regional movements emerged because musicians refused to treat stylistic boundaries as sacred. Contemporary neo-soul itself contains harmonic and rhythmic ideas deeply connected to jazz.

ZASKA belongs to that continuum.

Demanding that the project demonstrate its jazz credentials through extended solos or conventional swing would misunderstand how influence operates. Jazz can exist in chord vocabulary, rhythmic interaction, arrangement, improvisation and ensemble philosophy without requiring every song to announce the category.

The music does not need a purity test.

It needs musicians who listen.

Why the Audiophile Frame Misses the Story

Music this rhythmically detailed can easily attract descriptions centered on reproduction: bass extension, transient response, stereo separation, instrumental imaging, frequency ranges or the ability of playback equipment to reveal individual layers.

Those descriptions fundamentally misunderstand why ZASKA matters.

The bass is important because of what it does with the drums.

The guitar matters because of where Max places it against the rhythm.

The horns matter because their lines change the architecture of a song.

A singer matters because personality alters the emotional meaning of an arrangement.

Separating these elements technically tells us less than understanding how they cooperate musically.

ZASKA is almost the worst possible project to reduce to isolated sonic components because its central idea is connection.

The music exists between the parts.

A frequency chart cannot explain community.

A stereo image cannot explain trust.

The interesting question is not whether an audio system can separate twenty-five musicians.

It is how Max Zaska found a reason for those musicians to belong together.

From Dublin Toward a Wider Identity

The ZASKA story also demonstrates how a local scene can become internationally relevant without abandoning its local character.

Dublin supplied the network.

Irish musicians supplied the voices.

Jazz education supplied part of the vocabulary.

Neo-soul and funk provided important rhythmic languages.

The contemporary UK scene offered another source of inspiration.

Residencies in Paris created new collaborative circumstances.

None of these influences cancels another.

Instead, they demonstrate what contemporary musical identity increasingly looks like: local relationships operating inside international cultural networks.

ZASKA sounds Irish not because every composition contains an obvious national marker.

It sounds Irish because this particular network of musicians could only have assembled through the Irish scene Max inhabited.

The Meaning of the Village

Looking back from the later projects, It Takes a Village now feels almost prophetic.

The title initially referred to the extraordinary number of collaborators involved in making a debut album and to Max Zaska’s experience of becoming a father. But the phrase eventually described an entire career strategy.

ZASKA grew by bringing people together.

A Better Way expanded the community toward questions of responsibility and sustainability. The Paris residency made collaborative writing central. WRITE RECORD PERFORM extended those relationships into another body of work. Max’s later curatorial activity created platforms for other Irish neo-soul artists.

The village kept expanding.

This is why ZASKA deserves attention beyond genre.

There are more famous guitarists.

There are larger soul bands.

There are artists whose albums fit more comfortably inside jazz criticism.

Max Zaska’s distinctive achievement lies somewhere else: he built a musical identity strong enough to survive the constant presence of other identities.

That is difficult.

The Guitarist Who Does Not Need the Center

Perhaps the most revealing image of Max Zaska is not a guitarist standing alone in a spotlight.

It is a guitarist surrounded by musicians.

This does not diminish his importance. It defines it.

His harmonic knowledge allows him to create environments for singers. His rhythmic understanding allows guitar to become part of the groove rather than sit above it. His arranging skills allow horns and rhythm sections to function as structural voices. His production experience allows recordings involving many personalities to remain coherent.

Most importantly, his musical identity does not collapse when someone else becomes the focus.

That confidence is central to great bandleading.

The leader does not need to occupy every moment.

The leader needs to make every moment belong to the music.

A Better Definition of ZASKA

Calling ZASKA neo-soul is correct.

Calling it funk is correct.

Calling it jazz-related is correct.

Calling it an Irish collective is correct.

None is complete.

ZASKA is best understood as an evolving collaborative system built around Max Zaska’s writing and musical direction. Its sound changes because its people change. Its continuity survives because the values underneath the music remain stable: groove, openness, ensemble awareness, strong songwriting and the belief that another musician’s personality can expand rather than threaten an artistic identity.

That philosophy connects the young guitarist who once worked with a pre-fame Hozier to the musician who gathered more than twenty-five performers for It Takes a Village, then built A Better Way around another generation of collaborators, developed new work through residencies and eventually helped curate space for other artists in Dublin.

The trajectory is remarkably consistent.

Max Zaska kept making the circle larger.

What ZASKA Added to Dublin

The significance of ZASKA therefore cannot be measured only through record sales, streams or international recognition. The project belongs to the infrastructure of a scene.

Scenes need virtuosos.

They need songwriters.

They need venues.

They need audiences.

But they also need connectors—people capable of moving between communities and giving musicians reasons to work together.

Max Zaska became one of those connectors.

His project demonstrated that jazz-trained musicians could participate naturally in neo-soul and contemporary R&B without abandoning improvisational intelligence. It gave vocalists space to enter a sophisticated ensemble without becoming permanent members of a conventional band. It showed that Irish groove-based music could absorb international influences while remaining rooted in relationships formed at home.

Most importantly, ZASKA demonstrated that collaboration itself could become recognizable.

Listeners do not need the same singer on every track to know where they are.

They recognize the way the music behaves.

The Groove Is the Community

That may finally be the most useful way to understand ZASKA.

Groove is normally described as a rhythmic phenomenon, but it is also a social one. No single musician owns it. A drummer can establish a pattern, but the bassist changes its meaning. Guitar alters the spaces between beats. Horns create another layer. A singer places language against the rhythm.

Groove happens because several people agree about time while retaining enough independence to make that agreement interesting.

Community works similarly.

It does not require everyone to become identical.

It requires difference to become cooperative.

From It Takes a Village through A Better Way and the projects that followed, Max Zaska built his music around that principle. Jazz, funk, neo-soul and R&B provided the vocabulary, but people supplied the identity.

That is why the most important story behind ZASKA was never the precision of the recording, the extension of the bass frequencies, the separation of instruments or the supposed ability of the music to reveal the performance of an audio system.

The real achievement was human.

A guitarist in Dublin created a project in which singers, horn players, rhythm sections, producers and songwriters from different corners of a changing Irish scene could meet without surrendering what made each of them distinctive.

The debut album gave the idea its perfect name.

It really did take a village.

And more than a decade after the project began, Max Zaska was still finding new people to invite inside.