Blick Bassy

Born in 1974 in the village of Mintaba in Baasa country in the south-west of Cameroon, Blick Bassy grew up in Yaoundé, the country's capital. Coming from a large family, he returned to his native village at the age of ten with his grandparents for two years, during which he became acquainted with traditional customs, music, culture, and agricultural activities like hunting and fishing. There, he taught himself music and gradually become familiar with traditional rhythms and certain practices such as Bolobo singing or Assiko, a dance accompanied by music played by guitars and percussion. This time was a rich apprenticeship that encouraged at age twenty-two to found the group Macase, at the crossroads of jazz, soul, and Bantu culture, in which he sang and played percussion. The group enjoyed success in Cameroon from their first album Etam (1996), followed by Doulou (2002), crowned by a tour of nearly one hundred and fifty concerts around the world between 2003 and 2004. Blick Bassy, however, decided to fly on his own and start a solo career with the album Léman (2009), recorded in Salif Keita's studio in Bamako. This remarkable first essay is followed by Hongo Calling, published in 2011, an album which, while drawing inspiration from this traditional rhythm of Baasa culture, explores the links between Africa and Brazil through the geography of slavery. In 2015, the album Akö, at the crossroads of blues and folk, revisited the life and legacy of bluesman Skip James, and allowed Blick Bassy to reach a wider audience. A success that is confirmed with 1958 (2019), dedicated to the memory of the political and cultural figure of Ruben Um Nyobe, hero of the Cameroonian anti-colonial resistance, executed by French forces in 1958. The album was followed by a long world tour and crowned by the Sacem World Music Grand Prize and awarded as Best Album (Africa category) at the Songlines Awards. Over the years, the artist has performed hundreds of concerts around the world, while enriching the palette of his artistic creations. In 2016, the publication of his first novel Le Moabi Cinéma (Gallimard), a work on the borders of realism and fantasy, devoted to the idle youth of Cameroon, was crowned with the Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire. In 2019, he collaborated with the soul jazz trio Roseaux, and a year later, with the British electro group Disclosure and the contemporary music trio SR9. The past two years have seen him tour with Bikutsi 3000, a music and dance show that he himself staged following an order from the Quai Branly Museum which was presented in Germany, Australia, Guyana and soon in the United States. Following the successes of Akö (2015) and 1958 (2019), singer and composer Blick Bassy is back with a fourth album, again sung in the Baasa language of Cameroon. Madíbá brings together ten songs in the form of fables, dedicated to the theme of water, in which his high and angelic voice dominates, carried by delicate guitar, synthesizer melodies, and sober brass arrangements. The cuts are diaphanous and nevertheless, modernist songs, which testify to a contemporary and poetic Africanity at the crossroads of soul, folk, and electro.