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Manu Dibango meets Kirikou
France's Hot New Film Soundtrack
Paris
27/12/2005 -
Manu Dibango: No, it's not. Around fifteen years ago I composed the music for a cartoon series broadcast on French television, on France 3 to be exact. The series, called Kimbo et Kita, was about these two little African kids travelling round the world having adventures. There were 45 episodes in all and it was financed by President Houphouët-Boigny's widow, his first wife. I've worked on other soundtracks, too, notably in the 70s for L’Herbe sauvage, a film by Henri Duparc (from Ivory Coast), Ceddo by Ousmane Sembene (from Senegal) and Le prix de la liberté by Dikongué Pipa (from Cameroon). More recently, I did the music for Le silence de la forêt by Basseck Ba Kobio, who's also from Cameroon.
Is composing the music for an animated film a serious business?
From the moment you accept and say yes, you'll do it, it's a commitment – and I don't think a commitment should ever be taken lightly! Once you say you'll do something, you've got to show you're up to it. We spent eight entire months working on this film. We didn't improvise directly in front of the screen like Miles Davis did when he was working on Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [1957]. But we did work with the images, that's to say we picked out the scenes where Michel Ocelot, the director, wanted music, then we switched on the metronome and the rhythm box to gauge the tempo. After that, we tried to fit the tracks I'd prepared at home around that. There wasn't all that much music in the first Kirikou, but this second film's absolutely full of it. Apart from the songs by the likes of Youssou N’Dour, Rokia Traoré, Ismaël Lo and Angélique Kidjo there's also a lot of instrumental music playing under the images.
How did you go about choosing the musicians who appear on the soundtrack?
Well, Michel Ocelot actually grew up in Africa, in Guinea, so he had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted. Emmanuel Delétang, the musical co-director on the film, and I organised auditions, but with a fairly limited number of musicians. Basically, we needed people who were going to get along with one another and understand each other. The score's actually pretty open and the different musicians have to interact with one another. The whole thing was recorded without stress at Philippe Brun's place. He's a sound engineer who's used to working with African musicians. He's got this amazing studio that opens out onto a garden. The musicians we chose to work on the soundtrack are Noël Ekwabi on bass and guitar and Loy Ehrlich on keyboards, who also sampled extracts of African instruments like the kora and the balafon. We also got in Didier Malherbe on flute, Steve Shehan on percussion and a bunch of traditional musicians like Moriba Koita on the n’goni. Mamani Keita came into the studio to do vocals and, I have to say, I discovered the most extraordinarily talented singer there!
Compared to other soundtracks you've worked on in the past, did Kirikou cause you more or less sleepless nights?
Well, let's just say those of us who had hair ended up tearing most of it out! It wasn't exactly an easy ride! Michel Ocelot must be deaf! [Laughs]. On several occasions he made us redo things he didn't like and I have to say he's pretty finicky! There was this one day when he wanted a piece of music to accompany a scene of African women pounding millet. They'd actually bought this pestle at the local market in Dakar and recorded genuine sounds of women grinding millet over there. But when they got to Paris, they realised they didn't have the sound of the ground millet swishing around the mortar at the end. So we had to go off to Château-Rouge (an ethnic neighbourhood in Paris), buy a whole load of millet and star again. It's like when Michel wanted birdsong – it had to be recordings of real African birds, not any old birds from anywhere!
How did you come to meet Michel Ocelot?
He'd already got in touch with me when he was making the first Kirikou. But Youssou was really big at the time. He'd just had all these chart hits, so the film producers ended up hiring him. And it proved to be a good choice - the theme song to the first film was so catchy all the kids know it by heart! But for the second Kirikou, Ocelot came back to me….
Which film soundtracks have particularly marked you and stayed with you over the years?
I'd have to say Shaft, like everyone! But there's also Maurice Jarre's La Chanson de Lara and just about any soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. He's a completely brilliant musician and a real melodist – you can hum all his music off the top of your head! Michel Legrand and Quincy Jones are also excellent soundtrack composers.
Do you regard film music as a minor art?
No, certainly not! It's really interesting, if only from the point of view that you have to work on someone else's idea and not your own. It's a real challenge, finding the right balance between the music, the images and the dialogue. Besides, wouldn't you say that when a film soundtrack sticks in people's heads, it's important? Who doesn't remember the "chabada bada" of Un homme et une femme? And everyone's sung Luis Mariano's famous "Mexiiiico!" It might be bloody stupid, but you can't get it out of your head once it's in there!
Patrick Labesse
Translation : Julie Street
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