SALLY NYOLO - Mad Minute Music

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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. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 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
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
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SALLY NYOLO - Mad Minute Music

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