SALLY NYOLO - Mad Minute Music

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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