Listening for the first time to an album by Wasis Diop, poems of speech and sound, is to experience. As with Leonard Cohen, Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell, the feeling of entering a temple. A feeling so rare that each new record represents an event.
He has done six in almost thirty years: Hyenor 1992, No Sant (“Your name?”) 1994, Toxu (“Moving”) 1997, Juddu Bek (“Joy of living”) 2007 and Séquences 2014 The latter, a compilation of his many film music, presents his international hit, Everything is Never Quite Enough, the music for the American remake of The Thomas Crown Affair 1999.
The space is large, the silence sculpted. Unique sound and energy appear. Music imposes an initiation. Not because it is inaccessible, far from it, but it is subtle, detailed, refined. We know in advance that we need to get back to it, play the titles in a loop to capture the nuances, observe the structure, structure and reach with each new listener.
Why ice in the gazelle? “When I left the African gazelle to get on the ice, I chose Paris,” replied Wasis Diop, who uses the metaphor. “This is where I really wanted to come. For me, apart from the fact that these words sound good, it’s a form of North-South dialogue. “His words in French represent a first, which he describes as an” inner adventure “, as he plunges into Molière’s language by searching for his music, his sound, without writing the same things as in Wolof .
Travel to Paris
The eleven tracks on the album are reconnected to the sound of the music in the film Hyènes – the second feature film from his filmmaker brother, Djibril Diop Mambéty – that had made him famous. When he went even further back, Wasis Diop resumed his electric guitar, as under West African Cosmos, his first group, which had made a single “afro-pop” record in 1973, which has remained in the annals. He also whistles, as in the West in his childhood, including John Wayne’s Fort Alamo. “I went through my idols’ time,” emphasizes singer Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock, Miles Davis.
He could have been a painter, photographer or artistic director, as he was in his brother’s first feature film, Touki Bouki. Wasis Diop, who also records documentaries today, happily branched out into music and started in 1972 for Marseille aboard the film’s liner, Ancerville, at the end of the film. The flagship song on his new album, A Trip to Paris, pays tribute to the French capital, which has become his “village”, where he wrote most of his songs in Wolof.
“A cradle city for romantics from all over the world,” he says, “a place where Hemingway passed and where Boris Vian lived, part of human history. The song is about golden padlocks and ‘money on the bridges, on Ile Saint-Louis, migrants who sells the Eiffel Tower as souvenirs, mermaids at night, drops of blood and confetti on the sidewalk “.
For the first time, the record book is illustrated with his drawings. Y’a bon Diop is about Djibril. “He’s not my brother … A fan sent me a letter from a certain Djibril Diop Mambéty, who really existed and was a tirailleur. I thought I would write a song about that time. Senghor wrote in the inflection of a poem: “I ‘I’ll tear the posters Y’a bon Banania from all the walls in France. “I wanted to evoke this icon, an image that has never made me angry. The tyrant has an extraordinary shape, he laughs at his 40 teeth, he seems to have fun. The image is so positive! It’s time for us to reveal this dramatic past and that we laugh a little “.
Tribute to Doudou N’Diaye Rose and Jean Rouch
Other titles pay tribute to the great Senegalese percussionist Doudou N’Diaye Rose, who paraded in 1989 with Jean-Paul Goude in Paris for the second anniversary of the French Revolution, or to the French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. This man, who Wasis Diop considers “an African ancestor”, tells a Dogon myth, Sigui, a cult dedicated to the star Sirius, celebrated every 60 years. This interview excerpt, which Wasis Diop had already used to wish a happy birthday on the centenary of Jean Rouch’s birth in 2017, is delimited here as discreetly and effectively.
Wasis Diop tells the stories with a new narrative device. Two covers, Les champs de mil and Parler, one emphasizes the “dark and magnificent” beauty of a prostitute in Africa, the other the perverse effects of modernity. “I’m complaining about this rushing for the impossible, all our dreams stolen by progress – ‘You dreamed it, we invented it,'” the ad says. “What’s the point of dreaming then? The dream is inaccessible, it” is its beauty. Life is a journey, we go nowhere. But the most important thing is the road. With all these applications and technology dependence, we are infantilized. ”
A rock sabar dedicated to Soundiata Keïta
On a stopover in Dubai, in this city “from a software” where there is “no need to be dead to ascend to heaven”, he then throws himself back into the choir with ice in the gazelle and weaves Malian fables. not such a big gap in his eyes between Mandé yesterday and today’s Emirates: “To be modern is to be interested in history: a moment is nothing but everything that has been experienced before, plus what we experience in the present. Let us not forget that the first Charter of Human Rights was proclaimed in Mandé in the 13th century before being revisited in Paris in 1790 “. To Soundiata Keïta, founder of the Mandé Empire, he dedicates a rock sabar, a rhythmic bass from Senegal that adapts to electric squeaks reminiscent of laps … This album, without drums, with guitar, percussion and voice, is pictured : pop, eclectic and harmonious.
Wasis Diop Ice Cream in the Gazelle (Edit in Paris / MDC / Pias) 2021 Official Website / Facebook / YouTube
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