 |
  |
Inna Modja, lightening up reality
Debut album, Everyday is a New World
Paris
04/08/2010 -
Released last autumn, Everyday is a New World is the first album from the singer Inna Modja, revealing a pleasing jaunty pop style with an assured edge of soul. To coincide with her new single, Life, we met up with the young woman, who is a keen campaigner against the genital mutilation of African women. She is currently on a French tour.
When Inna Modja returns to visit her parents in Bamako, she puts down her watch and doesn’t pick it up again until she leaves. As if in this town where she was born 26 years ago time has no hold, or as if this young determined woman might at last manage to let herself go.
Inna Modja’s life is a fight – a fight in a well-padded ring, for sure, but a fight even so, with its uppercuts and hard blows. She is no stranger to comfort and love: “I’m the sixth of seven children. My father is a diplomat and as a child I travelled a lot. From Bamako where I was born and returned to live as a teenager, to Ghana and Nigeria, which explains that the first language I spoke was English,” words pronounced in perfect French by a singer who as a child seemed an unlikely candidate for the career that she so loves today.
“When I was 6, my parents signed me up to join a choir. At the time I couldn’t sing for toffee, but I really enjoyed it. I listened to a lot of music. Everyone at home listened to a lot of music, especially my parents, who put on records by Otis Redding and Nina Simone. I also grew up with all the different music my brothers and sisters were in to, from punk to 90s hip-hop via disco. I’m a real sponge, I love discovering new things. What was I drawn to most at the time? Ray Charles, whose voice conveyed so many emotions, and Diana Ross, who was a role model for me.”
The Rail Band school
Over the years, the ugly duckling turned into a lovely nightingale with a voice like velvet. “At 14, I really started to sing,” she remembers. “I wrote and composed by instinct depending on my emotion. A couple of years later, I went and knocked on Salif Keita’s door. He lived in the same street as us and I wanted to know how he started out and ask for some advice. He listed to me and helped me join the Rail Band. That’s where I really learned my lessons and understood how a group worked, the role everyone played, and where I really grasped what it meant to make music,” admits the young woman, who had left home by then.
It was the Malian singer and musician Habib Koité who offered her her first support band role. “It was in Akwaba. He also gave me a copy of the Beatles greatest hits and told me that when I understood the music in it (Hey Jude, Eleanor Rigby, Let it Be, etc.), I would find a way to express myself. Over the last ten years, I’ve listed to the Beatles and a lot of other stuff to find my path. I needed that time to find the maturity to be able to launch myself into producing my first album, and even that took me two years. I wouldn’t have made Star Academy, it’s far too fast for me.”
Not only African
The partnership was a huge success, producing some great pages of pop music for her fans – page that bore the faint watermark of her Africanness. “I don’t sing in Bambara or play the kora and I don’t do world music, but I am African down to my roots. It’s one of the things that make up my soul,” she says. “I’m African right through my body.”
A victim of female circumcision, against her will and that of her parents, she obviously feels that the symbol of her femininity was stripped away from her. She actively campaigns against the practice. She has now been “mended”, as the doctors say, and tries to raise awareness and show others that a future is possible.
Her own future is filled with song, whether she’s on stage performing guest act to Christophe Maé, or heading the bill and on the airwaves. Since her first single, Mister H, which caught the public’s attention, she has done a cover of Life, a track composed by Chris Samson and made popular by Des’ree. “Although it’s very marked by the nineties, Life has a real Motown feel. I like that transposition. We went to New York to make the video clip. I’m really proud that Chris gave me his blessing when he heard my version.”
Mister H
Inna Modja Everyday is a new world (Warner) 2009
Currently on tour in France
Squaaly
Translation : Anne-Marie Harper
25/02/2011 -
11/12/2009 -
20/09/2007 -
