Malian artist Anansy Cissé returns with an album called “Anoura”. © Karim Diarra
In a context that is not conducive to the development of young artists like him, however, due to both the situation in his country and the Covid-19 pandemic, Malian Anansy Cissé is back with Anoura, seven years after his first international album. The musician in his thirties sculptes his electric afro blues with finesse.
Taking risks when it comes to music can sometimes be taken literally. In 2018, on his way to Diré, where he is to perform at a festival 800 kilometers northeast of Bamako, Anansy Cissé was arrested by one of these jihadist armed groups that have controlled part of Malia’s territory since 2012. For them, he does worldly music. Then he is beaten, taken prisoner, his equipment torn to pieces.
In the wake of such a traumatic event, life is not necessarily the same. The interrogations merge. Make music? For this hope of the Malian scene, whose first international album was particularly well received outside Mali in 2014, the desire is no longer there. At least as far as his personal career is concerned.
The student, that he too is, prefers to fall back on the productions of others because many in the Malian capital go to see him to benefit from his know-how. Part of the Lost in Mali and Urban Mali collections come from its hard drives!
If these multiple collaborations, in hip hop as in the traditional register (especially Ali Baba Cissé), allow him to maintain an active connection with music, it is fatherhood that gives him back the desire to work on his own repertoire, while he is attentive. of the limitations of the local market: when you are neither a rapper nor a griot, the chances of being heard are fewer in Mali.
Anansy Cissé has been experiencing this for years, even though his talent is recognized. Is it this situation between blockade and artistic freedom that leads him on the album Anoura to go even further in the direction already taken in Mali Exaggerated’s time?
A remarkable production
In addition to the style that combines electric and acoustic elements in a kind of blues with an ingenuity similar to that shown by his countryman Lobi Traoré – would he not be heir, even if one is Bambara and the other sanghai? -, it is in terms of production that the ten new songs from Anansy Cissé are remarkable: the proximity of the percussions, the different levels at which the instruments are expressed without interfering with each other, the location of the bass and the sound given, the effects …
Illustration with Foussa Foussa: a throbbing motif on the electric guitar that sets the stage, complemented from time to time by a saturated solo that almost makes the rhythm’s reggae accent go into the background until she plays the first role in an unexpected dub, but as well felt as it is instructed.
Mina, which was originally a simple jam before it became an instrumental piece to which the artist gave his grandmother’s name, is another example of the careful, certainly time-consuming work done on this album in the case. Mix and events.
For this to be possible, the raw material still had to have the necessary qualities. In this area, the team gathered around him by Anansy Cissé was ideal. Consists mainly of musicians accustomed to the repertoire and is also cohesive from a generational point of view with the former member of the group Amanar, Mahalmadane Traoré or even the ngoni player Kandiafa, much in demand and whose projects personal accounts have earned him some notoriety.
The shadow of Zoumana Tereta, undisputed master of soku, also hangs over this disc: the strings of his traditional violin, recorded shortly before the disappearance of this Malian figure in 2017, are heard on several songs. As a link between past and present.
Anansy Cissé Anoura (Riverboat Records) 2021
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