 |
| |
| |
 |
About this Cameroon urban music, we only know the one coming from the Southern part of the country: the coastal makossa from Douala, made known in the whole world by Manu Dibango, and the forestry bikutsi from Yaoundé, made popular by the “Têtes Brûlées” or the moving singer Anne-Marie Nzié…
But this country is a musical mosaic, a summing up of Central and Western Africa with 240 ethnic groups and a vertical geography – a bit like Italy- crossing highly varying landscapes from the Southern luxuriant jungle to the Northern savanna of the Sahel…
Almost all members of Faadah Kawtal come from this arid North, even if they have been living for ten years in the South in Maképé…a Northern suburb of the boisterous Douala, economic capital and large Cameroon atlantic port. “Divine” is the first Cd dedicated to the urban evolution of a fascinating music, already often recorded under its rural form: by
the Foulbé (called in French Peul and in English Fulani). This folk of breeders, a minority of which remains nomadic, makes up the largest part of the population (almost twenty millions) in a huge region forming an arc from Guinea and Senegal (from which they probably originate) to Sudan, through Mali, Burkina, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Central Africa, and therefore Cameroon…
Progressively Islamized since the 11th century, the Foulbé kept their common language, the foufouldé, and a strong identity based on the fulaaku, a strict moral and social code, privileging discretion (even secrecy), freedom, restraint, stubbornness and openness towards other cultures. …
These ancestral values are to be found in the Faadah Kawtal’s song texts, and their music preserves the essence of the peulé tradition while expressing with modern sound their legendary hospitality.
Gérald Arnaud
Photograph: Patrice Millet
ISNEBO,
A GUIDAR IN A URBAN CROWD
His ecstatic and nasal voice evokes the one of the Senegalese Baba Maal, and it is not a coincidence: they are both settled and urbanized sahelians, but who managed to preserve their vocal power, needed by griots whose song should resound with the sky in open air fêtes of the desert or the steppe. Isnebo Haman, founder of Faadah Kawtal, could go on talking for ever, as soon as he evokes his roots:
“None of us has ever been nomad or even breeder. But our parents have known this type of life. My father gave it up in 1967 to become a textile worker in Garoua. We all spent our holidays in the village with young shepherds, who did not have the luck we had to go to school. We took part in their songs and dances in the moonlight. In each Foulbé village, there was during the whole year numerous fetes bringing together the surrounding community, the kawtal: the union.
The band’s name originates from it: Faadah Kawtal: the Union’s Messengers …We wish to extend this community brotherhood to the whole country, and even to the whole world. Each fete has its own repertoire and specific instruments. The harvest fete takes place to the sound of the tupi, conches made with snail shells. The one for the twins uses the gouma rhythm, a almost two-meter high drum, we also use in one tune of our album. The goumba galewa, as we call our music, is before all a synthesis of all these traditions of my Garoua region.”
THE GRIOT OF THE
“MASTER OF THE ELEPHANTS”
The great makossa singer-arranger Tom Yom’s spotted Kawtal’s rising talent during an outing in Garoua. In 1992, he invites them in Douala and puts them up in his home for over two years…being himself away in Paris concocting a few hits with his friend Manu Dibango.
Isnebo remembers with emotion the band’s difficult start: “Douala is a violent city, in which human relations have nothing to do with our concept of it according to the tradition. We have learnt in it the harshness of the modern world. But, at the same time, we have been helped a lot by the association Doual’Art and by the Phaco Club, in which we have been regularly playing from 1993 on. The club’s manager offered us his love for music and his material. One evening, the film-maker Parick Grandperret came to listen to us. He loved it and invited us to a screening of his film “the Lion Child”, with Salif Keïta’s music. When he came back for the location of the movie “The Master of the Elephants”, he had planned to hire Ismaël Lo or Youssou N’dour, but listening again to our band, he decided to give us a chance.
The whole movie music was made in Paris with our music and I was also hired as an actor to play the musician.”
Isnebo takes this opportunity to release in Cameroon his first two cassettes “Derkejo” (1996) and “Kilanta” (1997). Invited to the MASA In Abidjan, the Faadah Kawtal band then tours in Central Africa, comes to Paris with the Cameroon football team for the World Championship ’98 and belongs to the finalists of the RFI “Découvertes” competition.
A HIGHLY “DANCE” ELEGANCE
Four years later, this first CD, for a long time postponed, reflects this quest for authenticity and perfection, still shared by all Faadah Kawtal’s members…
Keyboard player and band director, Baliwi Innocent originates from the country’s Center: “I was born in the Bafia region, 120 km away from the capital Yaoundé, but I grew up in the North, where my father was appointed as a civil servant, and I was filled with the Foulbé culture. At the beginning, I was mad about the guitar, but my father, who worked for the justice department, thought that it was an instrument for bandits, gangsters. And, seeing that I was decided to become a musician, he forced me to play an organ which was there. From the start, I tried to adapt on it the sounds of traditional instruments, such as xylophones, the guérégou (monostring hurdy-gurdy) and especially the tidal or molorou flute.
This fascinating flute is to be found in all Foulbé people, from Senegal to Sudan. The player passionately blows in it while singing loud on another scale. The Peul’s other favourite instrument is the lute with two or three strings called in Cameroon garaya, and played in Faadah Kawtal by the bassist Dourmani Désiré and the guitarist Mboyan Ismaël, two brothers of the Ngaoundéré region.
Regarding the armpit drum kalangou, in Isnebos hands, it more than ever deserves its nickname of “talking drum”…
Irresistibly dancing but dignified, very dynamic but elegant and measured, Faadah Kawtal’s goumba balewa distorts all clichés on the “joyfully monotonous frenzy” of Central Africa’s dance music: The peoples cultural unity throughout the Sahel makes it much closer to the Nigerian fuji or even the Senegalese mabalax than to the bikutsi or the makossa!
Finally, we should not forget that Faaadah Kawtal grew up for ten years in Douala, the “French speaking Lagos”, one of the most hectic cities of the continent, informal laboratory of musical modernity. Francis Bebey himself used to say that in his home town “even horns of cars in traffic jams already sound like a real orchestra”!…
Xavier Jouvelet’s additional percussions contribute to this eclectism without any din, a model of diversity and subtlety in the mixing of voices and acoustic or electronic instrumental sounds.
Flutes polyphony inspired from the pygmies, arpeggio of “ornithologic” keyboards and crystal clear guitars delicately play on “funky” or “lover’s rock” bass lines: a genuine model of liberty without any betrayal of the tradition….
Gérald Arnaud
Contacts
Agent
Country: France
Name: Label bleu
Tel: 03 22 97 79 84
Fax: 03 22 92 92 29
E-mail: contact@label-bleu.com
Website: www.label-bleu.com
Adress: rue martin Bleu Dieu
BP 0631
80000 Amiens
|
|
|
|
|
