Cameroon's Blick Bassy seeks to unite new generation of African music makers
Composer, singer and songwriter Blick Bassy makes music that celebrates his multiple identities: as a Cameroonian living in France, a polyglot, a travelling artist, and a Pan-Africanist. RFI met him in Paris to discuss his latest album, as well as a new project to unite music makers from across the African continent.
Born in Cameroon, Bassy now lives between Africa and Europe, where he has been touring intensely since the summer.
At Anticipation Festival in Paris, a three-day music event dedicated to change and to ecology, he performed songs from his latest album, Mádíbá, which is inspired by the theme of water and the life it brings to humans, animals, plants and all natural things.
The songs form a kind of ecological fable about what brings us together.
Bassy told RFI he wanted to write an album about water as "the one living element we can find in every living element".
"My latest album talks about how we can live on Earth even though we are facing the fact that we cut our relationship with the big living family," he said.
"This includes human beings, trees, animals and other living elements that sometimes we don't even see because we are focused on ourselves. But all those living elements are really essential and important to the whole chain.
"As Ubuntu philosophy is saying: you are because I am; and I am because you are. Everything is completely linked."
Transatlantic inspirations
A former member of Cameroonian jazz-soul band Macase, Bassy moved to France in 2005 and has been working solo since the end of the 2000s.
Read more on RFI English
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