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Blick Bassy - “discovered” at last!
First international album
Paris
24/02/2009 -
Blick Bassy, a talented Cameroonian singer and guitarist who made it through to the finals of RFI’s “Découvertes” Awards in 2007, has just released his first album on the international scene. Léman (Mirror) surfs gently on waves of Cameroonian and West African rhythms, but also manages to incorporate Bassy’s personal influences which range from soul and jazz to bossa nova.
Blick Bassy turns up for our interview at the Place de la Bastille looking a little bleary-eyed. The night before the Cameroonian singer had put in a long night, performing a live gig at the men’s prison in Bois-d’Arcy, in the Paris suburbs. Bassy played a selection of songs from his new album, Léman, accompanying himself solo on guitar - just the way he has done over the past three years, assuring a packed schedule of concerts in the Paris region to earn his living and try and make a name for himself in the music world. The hardworking singer-guitarist has served his time and now it looks as if all those years are about to pay off. Léman (“mirror” in Bassa) took four years to write, record and produce, but it is finally signed, sealed, delivered and ready to make its mark.
World connections
Léman may be Bassy’s first album to enjoy international release, but the Cameroonian singer-guitarist is no newcomer to the music scene. He began his career as lead singer and principal songwriter with Macase, a band renowned for their innovative fusion of traditional Cameroonian rhythms and jazz. In the space of ten years and two acclaimed albums, Macase put themselves on the international music map, honing their own distinctive sound and touring worldwide.
After this collective success, Blick Bassy branched out on his own as a solo act and released his first album, Donalina, in Cameroon in 2005. It was on the strength of this album that he was selected to take part in RFI’s “Découvertes” Awards in 2007. He made it through to the finals, only to be pipped at the post by the eventual winner, Mounira Mitchala, a female singer from Chad. Bassy went on to leave Yaoundé and relocate to Paris where he launched a new solo career for himself from scratch. “The moment I got to Paris I started doing as many concerts as I possibly could,” he says, “That way, I thought at least people would keep on seeing my name on posters and some of them would be curious enough to come and see me play.” Bassy’s positive thinking finally paid off. In 2008, the director of the Dutch record label World Connection (whose world music stable includes the likes of Sara Tavarès and Tito Paris) chanced upon Blick Bassy’s music on Myspace. Impressed by what he heard, he headed off to watch Bassy in concert in a small, low-key venue in Paris - and three weeks later, much to his own surprise, the Cameroonian artist landed a record contract.
The good thing about taking the long, hard haul to fame was that Bassy had plenty of years to compose his own material and give free rein to his creative impulses along the way. Plugging away on the live circuit, Bassy indulged all his musical influences to the full, drawing on soul, bossa nova, jazz and, of course, the traditional Bassa rhythms he picked up as a young boy staying in his grandparents’ village in central Cameron. “When I was eight years old,” Bassy says, “my father - who thought I was way too stubborn - sent me off to Mintaba for a couple of years. And it was there that I learnt to fish and hunt but, most importantly of all, I discovered music there, too. Every night local Assiko musicians would drop by and sit around playing. Assiko is really amazing to watch. There’s generally a guitarist, a guy who plays a piece of corrugated iron or a bottle, a drummer and three dancers who perform the most incredible stunts while they’re dancing. For instance, one of the women might go into a trance and lift up a wooden table with her teeth while she’s dancing. I think my guitar-playing style has remained pretty close to Assiko over the years. I’ve developed a very percussive, rhythmic style so that I can perform on my own.”
Building musical bridges
Bassy’s new album unfurls upon an ocean of rolling Bassa beats, but this first internationally-released album also establishes some quite unexpected links between geographically distant lands such as Cameroon and Brazil or Mali and his grandparents’ village, Mintaba. “I grew up listening to all sorts of different music,” Bassy explains, “My father worked as a local commissioner and he was in charge of filling out work permits and residency documents for foreigners. We ended up with quite a lot of international LPs in our record collection, albums by Gilberto Gil, Joao Gilberto, Nat King Cole and stuff like that... And that music really made an impact on me. At the same time, I was like all the other young Cameroonians of my generation listening to a lot of Eboa Lottin and Jean Bikoko. It was only after moving to Paris that I came to discover musicians from West Africa like Ba Cissoko and Toumani Diabaté… That gave me the idea of inviting guest musicians to play the kora, the kamele n’goni and the Peul flute over diatonic Bassa rhythms from my homeland.”
Interestingly enough, Bassy ended up recording his new album, Léman, between Paris and Bamako, working in Salif Keita’s studio with the Malian star’s own musicians. Bassy describes the basis of his sound as being a willingness to experiment and push things in a slightly different direction. “Any traditional rhythm can take you off somewhere new if you change the way you play it a little… People often say that Cameroon is like a miniature version of Africa. If you take something like Bolobo - which is basically a Bassa rhythm - all you have to do is add in a pair of claves (wooden sticks) and you get Senegalese m’balax. And in northern Cameroon, for instance, musicians play rhythms that are very similar to those used in northern Mali.”
However far Blick Bassy may roam in his musical experimentation, however, Cameroon always draws him home, pulling him back to his primary source. Bassy claims that one of the most important things on his agenda right now, should he ever get a free moment, will be a trip back home to record the traditional Bassa tongue spoken by the village elders. Bassy made a first trip back home with this in mind in 1995, collecting traditional Bassa proverbs and parables to use in his lyrics. Almost fifteen years on, Bassy notes that the form of Bassa spoken in urban areas has evolved to being almost unrecognisable these days. But the old-style Bassa spoken in his grandmother’s village remains firmly intact. Those who speak Bassa believe that this marvellously image-rich tongue is closely connected to the natural world, to the sap flowing through tree trunks and the stars up above. Blick Bassy may move in more urban circles these days, but he admits that he still headed out to perform the songs from his new album under a star-filled sky one night. How else could he have got the moon’s approval on his new work?
Live at Le Satellit Café, in Paris, on 5 March 2009
Eglantine Chabasseur
Translation : Julie Street
25/02/2011 -
