SALLY NYOLO - Mad Minute Music

SALLY NYOLO
« La Nuit à Fébé »
RCA VICTOR / SONY MUSIC
new album released on May 30, 2011
Singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer,
Zap Mama when the group was at its peak (1993-95)
and winner of the 1997 ‘Découverte RFI’ (RFI Discovery) prize,
French-Cameroonian artist Sally Nyolo has just released her 6 th solo album,
the 1 st for a major record company.
Deeply rooted in the polyphonic and polyrhythmic traditions of Cameroon (bikutsi, assiko),
which provide the basis for her bold songs with their multiple influences, Sally’s transversal,
crosswise, “sciencey” (as she likes to call it) music has lyrics in Eton (her native language),
French and sometimes English, and lends a new meaning to the
world-music concept.
Her art is a world in itself.
“World Music.” If this overused and abused term still sometimes has a deeper meaning than crude
commercial labelling, Sally Nyolo is its most authentic incarnation. Peter Gabriel, the Pope of World
Music himself, saw it straight away. One of the first to recognise her talent, he released her debut
record on his RealWorld label: a four-track CD that is now a collector’s item for world-music history
buffs. That was back in 1994.
Before that, the sharp young French-Cameroonian law student made a name for herself moonlighting
in the competitive area of backing vocals. She worked with a wide range of artists who included Nicole
Croisille, Higelin, Sixun, Touré Kunda and Princess Erika. “I caught the music bug as a backing singer.
As a backing vocalist, you have your proper place, like an instrument in an orchestra. You have to
stick to a scale, a range, a language. You have to be as precise, authentic, exact and sincere as
possible, and become simply a voice in the music. My love affair with the French language began then
too.”
Graduating from backing to lead singer, Sally burst on the scene (1993-95) in the legendary Afro-
European women’s choir Zap Mama. At the height of the group’s success, she wrote several hits for it,
including the classic “Les Mamas des Mamas”.
She quickly rose to fame in her adoptive country, France. In 1997, shortly after the release of her first
album, “Tribu” (Tribe), a jury chaired by Manu Katché awarded her the prestigious RFI (Radio France
Internationale) “Découvertes” (Discoveries) prize.
This is the first album that this singer of contrasts has made for a major record company and her sixth
in fifteen years. Sally Nyolo is multifaceted and entire, spontaneous yet ultra-perfectionist, both a poet
and a musician. A singer in love with instruments, she is progressive but fascinated by her ancestral
heritage.
She arrived in France in the Yvelines district at the age of twelve (“the age of passage”, as she calls
it). She was brought by her civil-servant father who had been appointed to the Cameroonian Embassy.
Being very close to her mother, unlike most young African immigrants, she has not forgotten a single
word of her native language: Eton, one of the variants of the Fang-Béti group. On successive albums,
she has deftly juggled Eton and French (and to a lesser extent, English, the second language of
Cameroon). Like all Bantu languages, Eton is a tonal language, sung as much as spoken. Each
syllable can have a different meaning depending on its pitch. Then in her French songs, Sally plays on
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the classical tongue of Voltaire, the vernacular of the working-class suburbs of Paris and especially the
incomparably more melodic dialect to be heard around Yaoundé. “If you remember your native
languages, your childhood and roots will stay with you.”
Whatever its polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity, Sally Nyolo’s work has shown a constantly
changing, inexhaustible originality over the last few years, since the birth of her two children. The
charming nursery rhyme that gives the album its title, “La Nuit à Fébé” (Fébé Night), provides a
perfect example. On it, she accompanies her little son Zaïone on the xylophone (she dedicated one of
her previous albums to him).
Mount Fébé is the most majestic and rustic of the seven hills of Yaoundé. On its heights, surrounded
by birdsong, Sally has opened her own studio (named Tsogo after her mother). Naturally, the demos
for this album were recorded there with a noisy, bustling urban environment on one side and a rural
landscape reminiscent of her early childhood on the other.
Soleïnie (her first name, meaning “daughter of the sun”) was born in Eyen-Meyong and has regularly
returned to the tiny village in South-Central Cameroon since her father retired there a few years ago.
In the Lékié region, near the wild banks of the River Sanaga, virgin forest (increasingly threatened by
industrial deforestation) lies just behind the house, exposing her to the realities of this strange,
mysterious, appealing yet terrifying world. Sally is blasé now. She will always be able to cope. She is
more attracted than frightened by the complexity of nature and society. That is the message of “Mama
Say”, a beautiful, very gentle, yet firm and serious lullaby for a child who has just opened their eyes, to
give them self-confidence in life.
Sally Nyolo’s roots lie in this endangered world where humanity still lives in symbiosis with virtually
untouched nature, in osmosis with the animal and plant kingdoms. This is the life of the Béti, the
people to whom Sally dedicated her first two albums: “Tribu” (Tribe) and “Béti”; a people who were
dubbed “Lords of the Forest” by the anthropologist and novelist Laburthe-Tolra. They are a
multifaceted people whose tremendous poetic and musical culture is carried from village to village in
the form of the “MVET”, the name of their magnificent saga, comparable to the Odyssey. It is sung by
bards who, like Homer, accompany their words with music played on a magnificent string instrument:
the mvet, a harp-zither made of raffia and calabash. Sally Nyolo is one of the few women to have
learnt the instrument and has also taught it to her friend and fellow citizen Princess Erika.
On the album, Sally plays another instrument dear to the Béti: the xylophone, which they call the
“mendjang” and also the “balafon”, from the name their West-African Mandingo neighbours use, even
if their version is very different in its tuning and technique.
This woody, forest sound dominates the album. In Béti villages, the tom-tom (wooden drum) is still
used as a bush telephone and even guitarists are entranced by its raw, thudding beat - so much so
that they found a way to imitate it on their electric guitars, in the same way as the American composer
John Cage did with the piano. This was the origin of the balafon-guitar, invented and patented by the
late Messi Martin. Today, the modern version is used to play bikutsi, the traditional dance and music of
the Béti women. Sally is the leading proponent of bikutsi heritage. This “tradimodern” style (as they call
it there) was popularised in the 90s by the Têtes Brulées from Yaoundé. Here, it is represented by one
of its finest contemporary virtuosi, the guitarist Lina Show, introduced on Sally’s last CD, “Studio
Cameroon”. This time, he performs in perfect harmony with the young Senegalese prodigy Hervé
Samb.
With its frantic 6/8 beat (sometimes switching to 9/8), bikutsi (“let’s stamp our feet”) brings an
irresistible energy and swing to both this album and all Sally’s other records. Better still, here, bikutsi
meets with another, related, neighbouring and even more frenzied dance genre: “assiko”, played at
the local dances and unlicensed bars of Yaoundé.
Sally needed a driving force to bring unity, continuity and energy to this rich, jubilantly polyrhythmic
record: a suitably talented drummer. She simply chose the best of them all, not a Cameroonian, but a
native of the Ivory Coast: Paco Séry. No surprise there - she started to sing with his band, Sixun,
twenty years ago. There is another, very good reason, though: their regions may lie two thousand
kilometres apart, but there is a surprising kinship between Béti bikutsi and the ziglibity of the Bété,
Paco Séry’s people.
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From the very first two songs (“Vengeance”, performed by the excellent assiko artist Robert Ngwé
Parfait, and “Love”), the French rhymes merge elegantly and vigorously with the Cameroonian beats.
On “Vengeance” (“Does chilli only sting in someone else’s eye?) - Sally condemns the law of “an eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. “Love” is a hymn to love to rival Edith Piaf’s, but very different:
“Until our bodies dissolve / Like bits of marshmallow / In the bellies of big cats /Our hearts must say
love / Until the gods give us something new”. For Sally Nyolo (and for the Béti in general), words and
music coil together to form a single vortex.
In the old days, Béti village women would form a circle or ring and each in turn would move to the
centre, where they danced, sang and leapt for the others, deploring the evils of a society dominated by
men. That was the origin of bikutsi, a parody of the male war dance. Traces of this improvised
women’s musical therapy are to be found in Sally Nyolo’s songs, for instance “Ombomo”, an ironic
allusion to forced marriages that were sometimes even arranged before the bride was born! Or “Owé”
(the Béti word for “yes”), where Sally sings of a faith that is not specific to any particular religion. “As
an African woman, I’m an instinctive believer. We carry faith inside us for everyone!”
The reverse side of this ideal woman turns up in the hilarious, sarcastic “Miss Silicone”: a vitriolic
tirade against the evils of plastic surgery and the destructive sham of cortisone-based cosmetics used
by many women (and men too) to whiten their skin. “Lola, I preferred it when you were Sandra / Miss
Silicon Valley, you’re not what you were”, complains Sally in a duet sung with her friend Guizmo, a
member of Tryo, a band she has written for.
The album’s only English-language song, “Stolen by Night”, is a gorgeous ballad that Sally penned
for a show by her novelist compatriot Blaise N'Djéhoya and the African-American saxophonist David
Murray, paying tribute to the brilliant African-Russian writer Pushkin.
This theme of mixed culture is developed in “Toi & moi” (You and Me), which can be seen as an
anthem to difference and contact. On the track, Sally weaves cello and flute over a startling
afrobeat/reggae/salsa rhythm. “How can you mix oil and water? How can you unite hot and cold? It’s
hard, but you did it when you came to me, and I did it when I went to you… We did it!”
“We did it.” In fact, we built a bridge. “Bridge” is a regularly repeated word - a sort of leitmotiv - when
you talk to Sally Nyolo. She sees her life and music as a bridge between continents, cultures,
generations, languages and sexes. She is very much a Béti in that this heroic idea of a crossing is a
recurrent feature of the ancestral saga of MVET. Travelling from very far away in the North, who
knows where (some say Ancient Egypt), her migrant people reached a supposedly impassable natural
obstacle: the River Sanaga, on whose banks Sally Nyolo was born. Her ancestors managed to cross
the river with the help of their own immortal forebears - a central theme of the MVET, some versions of
which actually mention “birds of iron”.
As we listen to Sally Nyolo’s transversal, crosswise music, we are reminded less of improbable
prehistoric aircraft than of the extraordinary creeper bridges modelled on spiders’ webs that span
African rivers - ephemeral, gracious, natural, transparent, incredibly efficient architectural marvels that
look so much like musical staves! And “L'ère du verseau” (The Age of Aquarius) suggests the
canoeist’s art. Sally has based the song’s beat and singular sounds on the dreamlike sweep of the
paddle. Her friend Phil Will’s lyrics do the rest. “I had such wild plans / For the planet / I reversed the
route / Of the obsolete past / Let the ephemeral work / From water to air.”
Who but a true daughter of the forest - a true daughter of the “Lords of the Forest” - could have made
such a record?
The impact is powerful, but comforting and bracing too - from nature to culture, from the music of the
past to the sound of the present day. The journey ends like a dream, among the Bokué, a community
of pygmies who are old friends of Sally Nyolo. North Cameroonian roots are apparent on “Ngoulaï”, a
wonderful falsetto chant that rests delicately on the strings of a prehistoric musical bow, fortunately still
existing here and there, like the creeper bridges.
Gérald Arnaud,
co-author of the “Musiques de toutes les Afriques” encyclopaedia (Ed. Fayard publisher)
promo contact: Agnès Thomas – tél: 01 53 26 93 85 – 06 08 64 58 39 / agnes.thomas@wanadoo.fr
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ MAD MINUTE MUSIC _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
5/7 rue Paul Bert – 93400 Saint-Ouen – FRANCE
tél : +33 (0)1 40 10 25 55 / fax : +33 (0)1 40 10 17 37 / www.madminutemusic.com