Launching into a tribute to Hector Zazou, who died in the French capital on 8 September, it is hard to decide whether the great fusion maestro should be remembered as the first of the experimental post-moderns or the last great Renaissance man. For Zazou was always a man of contradictions: Jack-of-all-musical-trades but resolutely avant-garde, elitist yet popular and accessible, generous yet restrained, cultured and educated yet always working with his gut instincts. One thing is undisputed, however, and that is that Hector Zazou leaves behind a rare and impressively eclectic body of work - a work through which it is all but impossible to trace coherent lines as the great adventurer spent his lifetime exploring the outer reaches of popular 21^st-century music.

Zazou played an instrumental role in pioneering the synthesiser as well as consistently pushing back musical boundaries - which he did to great effect on his seminal album Barricades 3 (recorded with Joseph Racaille in 1976) and a series of albums he made in the early 1980s with the Congolese singer Bony Bikaye. These albums and the - sadly all too rare - live collaborations of Zazou and Bikaye paved the way for artists like Peter Gabriel, Jon Hassell and Jean-Philippe Rykiel in the 1990s, fusing as they did electronic loops and digital beats with African vocals steeped in centuries of tradition. Around the same period, Zazou also experimented with classical music, backing vocalists and string quartets with electronica. A prime example of this can be found on his groundbreaking album Reivax au Bongo, released in 1986.

Zazou, world music's roving missionary, travelled to the four corners of the globe, bringing his musical finds back to Paris. Here, he would reconstruct, rebuild, rework and remix his raw material into albums that proved to be both innovative and timeless. It was Zazou who produced Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses, setting up a culture shock between traditional polyphonic harmonies and electro beats (for which the eponymous Corsican group won a deserved "Victoire de la musique" award in 1992). An ambitious range of concept albums followed such as Chansons des mers froides, a 'tour de force' combining luxuriant electronic soundscapes with folk and pop singers from northerly latitudes (including Björk, Suzanne Vega and Siouxie Sioux). Then there was Sahara Blue, an album which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet Arthur Rimbaud (featuring contributions from the likes of Gérard Depardieu, John Cale, David Sylvian, Dominique Dalcan, Lisa Gerrard and Richard Bohringer). Zazou's 1998 album Lights in the Dark (recorded in collaboration with Peter Gabriel, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Brendan Perry and Breda Mayock) was a fascinating New Age-style exploration of ancient Celtic music, which he followed by a stunning tour with the American rock singer Sandy Dillon. "I can be a bit inconsistent at times," Zazou admitted in his typically understated way.

Explaining his urge to experiment with radically different musical universes on successive albums Zazou once said, "That's the way it works with comic strips and cartoons! Why shouldn't it be the same with music? If people decide to stay stuck in the same old rut, it's often because they feel forced to. On the one hand, they force themselves and, on the other, they're compelled to do so by the dictates of the market. There are all sorts of outside pressures, aside from the problem of self-censorship."

Zazou's ability to flit from one musical world to another with the greatest of ease ended up making him a sought-after expert. It was Zazou the nation turned to in 1998 when France needed a six-hour musical extravaganza to accompany the mega-procession that kicked off the Football World Cup. Zazou rose to the occasion in style, creating a giant multicultural symphony evoking all five continents. Meanwhile, Zazou's fame as a producer grew and he also found himself much sought after in the studio, standing at the helm of albums for everyone from Yungchen Lhamo and Laurence Revey to the Galician bagpipes-player Carlos Nunez.

But was the great fusion pioneer more of a hands-on inventor or a theorist? "What I'm most interested in is sound," Zazou once claimed, "The moment when I'm actually in the studio recording is not the most interesting moment in the whole process." The talented multi-instrumentalist once admitted that, "I can blow into just about anything to make a sound, but if I record a guitar part, for instance, I'll spend a lot more time working on it afterwards than I did playing." In the course of his musical peregrinations, Zazou also established himself as one of the world's most respected virtuosos on the theremin (one of the earliest electronic instruments played with antennae). "Sometimes I play it well, sometimes I play it very badly," he said, "The theremin can be a very capricious instrument!"

Towards the end of his life, Zazou was still branching out in new and unexpected directions, making forays into the contemporary art world, for instance. One of his last projects, Q+C (Quadrichromies), was the result of a two-year collaboration with the digital painter Bernard Caillaud (released as a CD and DVD in 2006). Just before he died, Zazou managed to put the finishing touches to an ambient instrumental album recorded in India. In the House of Mirrors is scheduled for posthumous release on 6 October 2008 on the Crammed label.

Working under his real name Pierre Job, Zazou was also a respected journalist, penning colourful travel pieces for several publications including Le Figaro Magazine.