GWEN ANSELL profiles Brice Wassy, `king of makossa’ and one of the performers in the Afrika Oye! concert performers
CAMEROONIAN music found its international fame with Manu Dibangu and Soul Makossa. So, initially, did the imported star of tonight’s city hall rhythmfest, drummer Brice Wassy. But there’s rather more to Cameroonian music than makossa, and Wassy’s career tells much of the story.
Makossa – Cameroonian base with continental and European spicing – was always a slightly soft, if highly accessible, musical option, based as it was on the rhythms of children’s clapping games. Dibangu himself admitted as much: “It’s not traditional … it’s an Afro-European music.”
Back home, though, there were many other traditions to draw on: balafon, rattle and drum music, rhythms like the man’gambe of the Bamileke people, the urban guitar and rhythm music of Douala and Yaounde (assiko) – and the most influential sound for current Cameroonian pop (outside of Zairean soukous), the bikutsi rhythms of the Beti people.
Bikutsi, faster, harder and more rhythmically complex than makossa, with solos that are jagged rather than melodic and layers of xylophone patterning, was first modernised and popularised in the late 1960s by the legendary singer Mama Ohandja, who turns up, along with Dibangu, as a guest on Wassy’s latest album, the launch pad for his South African concerts, N’Ga Funk.
Wassy (who also appears in the reference books as Wassi or Wouassi Brice) went to Paris in the mid-1970s after a long spell jamming around the clubs of Yaounde and joined Valerie Lobey in Dibangu’s drum team.
Like most other Paris-based African performers, he also worked with the francophone constellation – Pierre Akendengue, Francis Bebey, Wally Badarou, Toure Kunda et al – and on countless studio gigs, one of which led to work on Salif Keita’s first solo album, Soro, in 1987. He stayed with the Malian for six years.
But Wassy’s tastes spread broader than Afropop. He gigged in the United States with Colin Walcott, doyen of world music percussionists, and with free jazzer, trumpeter Don Cherry. He was producer on Jean-Luc Ponty’s 1991 African flirtation album Tchokola. (The song was one of Wassy’s, and reappears on N’Ga Funk. It’s also the name of his current band.)
Meanwhile, other things were happening in Paris. The programmed beats of ambient, techno and drum’n’bass were colonising the clubs.
And the “second-generation” of bikutsi broke on to the scene, in the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll formula of that most audacious of Cameroonian bands: Les Ttes Brules (Singed Heads).
If you’ve never heard Les Ttes, Wassy’s music sounds totally without precedent. If you have heard them, you can see the roots he’s growing from. The group shared with Wassy’s current band a taste for bikutsi rhythms, for futuristic sound-desk effects, for a solid funk groove and for high-speed energy.
Wassy, however, steps outside the formula in several directions. Bikutsi is only one of the several Cameroon rhythms he draws on. And he uses those rhythms in a much more complex and sophisticated way than Les Ttes Brulees.
He sets real balafon, djembe, cabassa and woodblocks against synclaviers, a cello and a fretless bass. And so – as in Tananas’ Unamunacua – texture comes to play as important a part as rhythm. With guitar partner Vincent Nguini (a Paul Simon as well as Dibangu alumnus) he slides in the direction of sinuous nightclub makossa. With four front-line horns, he creates edgy, Afro-acid jazz. With village field recordings, he conjures electric folk.
The Afrika Oye! concert will be held at the Johannesburg city hall tonight, Friday May 9 and in Vista Mall, Mamelodi on May 10
This is intense, sometimes experimental music, miles from the superficial obsession with “atmosphere” and exoticism which dominates much Afropop.
Because it retains its base in groove, it’s also a highly danceable formula for anyone whose ears reach beyond the thumpingly obvious. How much of his studio sound Wassy can bring to a live stage we’ll hear tonight – but his complex, many-stranded vision of “third-generation bikutsi” will certainly survive the journey.