Zenglen, Incubator of Compas Talent

In the late 1980s, three young music enthusiasts laid the foundations for what would become one of the most influential formations in compas direct: guitarist Jean Brutus Derissaint, singer Gary Didier Perez, and keyboardist Patrick Martineau. The band’s name came from a chance incident during a rehearsal: beer bottles placed on a vibrating amplifier fell and shattered. The three friends joked about the difficulty of cleaning up the “zenglen” (broken glass) and spontaneously adopted the Creole word as the group’s name