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Sally Nyolo’s Studio
Sally Nyolo’s Studio
Paris
22/12/2006 -
Studio Cameroon was slowly honed to perfection, taking a full eight years in the making. Sally Nyolo originally came up with the idea for the project back in 1998. The singer, who has been living and working in France for the past few years, was on a tour of Cameroon at the time. She recalls how during her stay musicians from her homeland kept coming up and asking her, now that she had her own career underway, what she could do to help them. Touched by what she heard, Sally came up with a swift response, setting up a recording studio on the top of Mount Febe (the famous hill that looks down over the hustle and bustle of Cameroon’s capital city, Yaounde). Sally’s intention was not to record just any kind of music, however. Faithful to her roots, she decided to turn the spotlight on unknown musicians working with traditional instruments and ancestral rhythms. Chance played a large part in the rest of the project, bringing her into contact with a wealth of unexpected talent on successive trips to Cameroon.
Personal anecdotes
Sally appears to have forged close ties with all the artists involved in the project, bursting with stories and personal anecdotes about everyone featured on Studio Cameroon. "I remember one night,” she says, “I was up on the hill and this incredible music came drifting in on the wind. I could hear these amazingly frenetic rhythms pounding out from somewhere but I couldn’t work out where. Then someone took me to where the music was coming from and I discovered D’embazo Star de Nkometou." Other artists such as singer Edmond Fils Nkoa came directly knocking on her door. Studio Cameroon turned out to be a long-term project, Sally recording some of the artists involved in 1998, while others came on board in 2004. "They were all more than up to the job,“ she says with pride, “All I had to do was enter their musical universe and add a spoonful of sugar or a pinch of salt here and there. When they didn’t even need that, I just sat back and enjoyed the meal!"
Sally is full of praise for young Gisèle Mbo Anji, a singer she met through a Cameroonian journalist. "Gisèle really has tremendous talent,” she says, “She’s still very young, but listening to her you’d think she’d been singing for a lifetime. Gisèle has been touched by grace – it’s as if she’s lived ten lives already! The first time I heard her sing I got goosebumps all over my body and tears sprang to my eyes.” Producer Sally describes Mama Andela, a singer who featured on her solo album Beti, as "an absolute rainbow" and talks of Roger Ngono Ayissi, who she came across by chance one day at the sprawling Mokolo market in Yaounde, as being one of the leading mvet-players in the country. Then, of course, there are The Bidjoï Sisters, representing the next generation of bikutsi stars (the music from Sally’s native region in the south of the country). "Thanks to The Bidjoï Sisters,” she says, “I rediscovered the joys of traditional bikutsi, the kind you hear in the local village. They’re totally amazing artists, capable of looking at a situation then singing about it without having to write anything down first."
Acoustic values
Studio Cameroon is an album for all those nostalgic for the good old days who, like its producer, regret “the invasion of the rhythm box” and bemoan the fact that today in Cameroon "rural music doesn’t make it into town so much.” “People don’t want to listen to acoustic sounds as much and there aren’t enough bars where you can sit and listen to musicians playing the mvet or the balafon or singers performing a cappella like they do in the village at night.” The problem, according to Sally, is that Cameroon is slowly losing “the spices” that give the place its distinctive flavour. But the enterprising producer is no longer alone in preserving the music she loves. “With Studio Cameroon,” she says, “I feel as if we’ve finally managed to create a federation based on producing high-quality stuff, an artists’ union committed to defending good honest music.”
The logical follow-up to Studio Cameroon will be solo albums from a selection of the dozen artists involved in the compilation. A film about the project is also currently in production, masterminded by François Bergeron (who has already made a documentary about Sally Nyolo’s life and career). “Now,” declares Sally, brimming with energy and enthusiasm, “all I want is to get out there and show everyone what we’ve got. I want to take all the artists from Studio Cameroon onto the festival circuit and get the world listening to music ‘made in Cameroon’.... If we can manage to capture the sound of our lives here and sell it to the world, we can turn the spotlight on what’s happening here. And that will make other people want to come out here and see for themselves. It shouldn’t always have to be us going to others!”
Fanny Pigeaud
Translation : Julie Street
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22/12/2006 -
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