Gentle, Cameroonian jazz to ease you into your Monday.

I don’t think I ever mentioned this, but I saw a great little Herminia concert a couple weeks back. She was even smaller and older-looking than I imagined, but her voice filled the room.

The venue was the Mam’Bia, a good Cap Verdian restaurant near Strasbourg St-Denis in Paris. It’s small so only about 50 of us were at the show.. your typically random mix of “world music” people: old, young, strange, seemingly normal.

The woman I’ll post today, Cameroonian Anne-Marie Nzié, is a bit like Herminia in that her voice is still as powerful as ever at the age of 67. I don’t know much about her except that her one and only wide-release, Beza Ba Dzo, is a great listen. It features the likes of Manu Dibango, Brice Wassy and others.

The most interesting part of her biography is when she had to spend a long time in hospital after falling from a mango tree in the mid-1960s. It was there, in her hospital bed, that she was introduced to Hawaiian music by her brother. After finally leaving hospital the two started performing together, him on Hawaiian guitar, Nzié providing the vocals. That’s an original start to a career if I’ve ever heard one.

Anne-Marie Nzié – Sarah