Interview with Etienne Mbappé in Sydsvenskan,
leading morning paper in Malmö, Sweden, Friday 28 July, 2006
One more singing, songwriting bass virtuoso
from Cameroon presents himself: Etienne Mbappé.
And he’s a bit tired of being compared to
Richard Bona.
– We are good friends and grew up in the same
area in Douala in Cameroon, he tells us. I’m a bit older than Richard and I
actually started singing before he did.
And Cameroon certainly has an especially strong bass tradition.
– Everybody plays the bass in Cameroon. In the generation before us, there were
several good bass players who went to France and played with great artists
there. We listened to their records, the bassplaying was really swinging.
These bass players had been checking out
Motown’s James Jamerson and Jaco Pastorius, so when us guys heard Jamerson and
Pastorius on the radio we thought that they were musicians from Cameroon!
It was
not until I moved to France, 14 years old, that I realised what was going on.
And it was then that Etienne Mbappé started
playing seriously – guitar.
Although all his friends also played guitar, so
when it was time to start a band, he switched to bass and explored Beatles,
Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Then he went to jazz and eventually three
years at the conservatory where Mbappé studied classical guitar, trained
sight-reading and learned a lot about opera.
At 20, he turned professional and was quickly
hired by great African artists based in Paris, such as Salif Keita and Ray
Lema. Etienne Mbappé jumped into various musical styles.
– For a while I had twenty repertoires with twenty different bands in my head.
The best musical training you could have.
Now he’s a well respected name, who has done
three years with Zawinul Syndicate, played at Ray Charles’ last album and at
Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra’s latest. The other year he released his
solo album “Misiya”: pop, funk, singer-songwriter tunes with acoustic guitar,
everything afro-filtered.
– I work a lot with my texts and really want to
say something. My best bass solo can not explain to my brother that he must use
a condom to avoid HIV. So I have to sing.
Etienne Mbappé plays with black silk gloves.
Why?
– It’s not at all because I’m allergic to the
metal in the strings or anything like that. The sound becomes a bit softer and
much bigger when I use gloves, and that’s the sound I want.