Language:

Eton French English

Genre:

Bikutsi Afropop

Instrument:

Female vocals

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Biography

Sally Nyolo has an African-European background, she is born in Southern Cameroon, but has lived in Paris since she was thirteen. She started her career as a backing singer for other artists, among them Touré Kunda. In 1993 she started her own group and performed in Paris. In that same year, she sang at the WOMAD Festival in England and her performance won her a place on a compilation released by Peter Gabriel's Real World label. She then became a member of a female vocal group Zap Mama. She is singing on their first two disks. She was the first of the Zap Mama girls to go solo. From Paris she built up her own career and has now released four albums under her own name. Sally Nyolo has taken the a capella based song style of Zap Mama in another direction.
Where Zap Mama eventually went down the more rock influenced road, Sally has returned to her roots and adopted the old rhythms of her homeland of Cameroon.

Relevant artists:
Zap Mama
Cesaria Evora
Gigi

TRIBU
Lusafrica/1996

MULTIKULTI
Lusafrica/1998

BETI  
Lusafrica/2000

This is a kind of "conceptual album", where every track is a little subordinate to the whole. This entire product can best be described by the term "back to the roots", and in Sally Nyolo's case this means her home village in Cameroon. Parts of the disk were recorded in Cameroon, parts in Paris, but the idea was to give an impression of village life, and this is what Sally Nyolo and her fellow musicians have managed to do. The disk sounds very organic and one has the sensation of being in an African land with "Beti". The ground rhythm is bikutsi, an old song style developed by the Pygmy people in the rain forest near the village. This is so well blended with several modern style directions that it doesn’t seem disturbing or artificial. The calabash is employed as the rhythm instrument, and one can also hear the nvet, a calabash guitar and accordion. Under the voice there’s a lively bass. The eighteen tracks are varied, but hearing all these small songs in a row can become a little tiring. The playing time is 60 minutes and the lyrics are a fine mixture of word play and short stories from village life. Enjoyable.

ZAIONE  
Lusafrica/2002

Sally Nyolo continues her tonal/atonal experiments and expeditions through the jungle of African music. While her last album marked a return to her native village, "Zaione"'s expression seems more urban. It is cozy, feminine, and difficult to pigeon hole, musically speaking - it's somewhere between the bikutsi of her Cameroon homeland and international impulses, like reggae and rap.
Like her last album, "Zaione" is a collection of relatively short songs - 15 in all - with a total playing time of 1 hour. Several songs are quite catchy, such as "Oya", with its sweet violin solo. On "Jah know" she collaborates with Princess Erika and the style is close to what her old friends in Zap Mama have been producing lately. It's the CD's best track and has been released on single, together with "Mintong Mindong", which is also among the better songs.
There are many positive things to recognise about "Zaione": several experiments with funny voices, original sound colours, and so forth. However, Sally Nyolo is repeating past mistakes. As with "Beti", this does not really take off as an album. There is simply too much shilly-shallying in between the good songs, and the album's structure fluctuates too wildly. Every time Nyolo seems to build up to something, that something disappears all too swiftly and one is faced with a confusing mix of musical expressions.
Sally Nyolo is an exciting artist, but I feel she still hasn't realised her true potential.

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