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.
Music began at home for Bassy, who continues to write most of his songs in the Basaa language of central and coastal Cameroon.
"Music came to us, to my sisters and brothers, to me, very early, as my mother was singing all day long," he told RFI. "Music was really present at home."
He learned to sing at church before taking up the guitar.
"After secondary school, I decided to embrace music as my work," he said. "I feel that I'm not the one who decided, music decided for me."
Travelling provided fresh inspiration, plunging him into sounds from Latin America to Europe.
While his music offers a mix of genres – soul, folk, electro and melodies from his native Cameroon – his latest album is a deeper exploration of his own culture, both as a villager and a cosmopolitan African.
Its title Mádibá means "water" in Cameroon's Duala language, while also invoking one of Africa's greatest shared icons, Nelson Mandela.
Bassy has written about his own country's struggle for freedom. His song "1958" is dedicated to anti-colonial leader Ruben Um Nyobè, who took up an armed struggle to claim full independence for Cameroon from France and was shot in the back by French forces.
Cameroon's Blick Bassy remembers 1958 and his fallen hero
Pan-African production
Drawing on his experience as an African artist who has found international success, Bassy now has a new project: a festival in Cameroon for other young music makers.
Billed as the first festival in Africa to offer training in production, Africa Prod Fest aims to encourage those starting out in the music industry to move forward with their own projects.
"The idea of the festival in Cameroon came from the process I went through myself to understand the structures of the music business," Bassy said. "And now I would like to share this experience with my people in Africa."
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Having worked with other African artists, including legendary Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita, Bassy also hopes that bringing producers together from across the continent will feed musical cross-pollination.
"We can build something, a connection, because sometimes when you're living in Central Africa, you don't have any idea about the type of music that is made in West or East Africa," he told RFI.
"So for me, it was really important to start by making this kind of connection because we have some beautiful melodies and harmonies."
Blick Bassy will be performing in Marseille in October, in Toulouse and Brest in December, and Achères in March.
