Moh! Kouyaté

Label it if you can. In 2015, Moh! brings chaos to the radio waves with his single "T'en vas pas, ça pas pas", taken from his album Loundo : he reveals his signature style and his electric, electrifying riffs, in a hot fusion of blues, rock, funk, afrobeat and traditional Mandinka music. Absolutely crazy. Kouyaté, the globetrotter of groove, stands out as one of the new voices of truly enchanted Africa. Since then, the artist has colored his scores throughout his wanderings in the United States, then his dive into the Parisian afro-jazz scene. Moh! the trigger panics the compass with his all-terrain playing influenced by B.B. King, George Benson, Jimi Hendrix, Sékou Diabaté of the legendary Bembeya Jazz National and other wizards of the six-string. His gig-bag is covered in macaroons, the customs officers have headaches... Moh! demonstrates that there are no boundaries other than those we impose on ourselves. The proof with his new album, Mökhöya.

 

Less is more. If the atypical artist had revisited the traditional Guinean repertoire on his previous album, Guinea Music All Stars, by modernizing some standards from the great orchestras of Conakry, he went to the essentials on this new disc, composed in an intimate mode and in a formula quartet, surrounded by an All Star acoustic strings (korafola Sefoudi Kouyaté and cellist Olivier Koundouno) and trumpeter (Camille Passeri.) “I had wanted to make an acoustic album for a long time, the confinements gave me the opportunity by allowing me to return to the essence of music and to go against current overproduction. »

 

Humanity as the only horizon

Mökhöya? Humanism in Malinké. A call for more fraternity and solidarity in these troubled times. In Kankelen, Moh! the magnanimous invites his contemporaries to “love each other” rather than tear each other apart.According to him, life is “a journey that requires courage, mental strength and dignity,” he recalls in Douniatego. “We must learn humanity,” urges Djeli Moh!, descendant of a dynasty of griots, in Siiya, a tribute to the guardians of tradition.

Occasionally, Moh! chronicles African society with a sharp eye as when he denounces the forced marriage between a grandfather and a little girl in Tanoun, summoning tribal choirs and a digressive jazz trumpet. Place the caustic Kouyaté in the hypnotic lament N’Khafo, mocking the dialogues of the deaf: “Speak to the stubborn? You are wasting your time, he will only hear by seeing it,” he laments. To illustrate it, he dusts off daddy's blues by combining African ochres with a blue note, the shuffles of the American Deep South with desert trances. Better, on the instrumental Tara, the kora crosses iron and nylon with the six-string and teases the pentatonic scale, reminding if necessary that Africa is land and mother of blues.

The only song sung in French, Toi et Moi describes the pain of exile through a couple separated by “immense lands”. They will “wander, dream” to abolish distances. Double meaning: “Implicitly, this song deals with the intolerable situation of undocumented immigrants in France, who are thrown onto the sidewalks. How can we explain all these constructions when many sleep outside? »

 

Mökhöya is both a return to West African sources and a border-hopping game. “Mixing is my DNA. » This bridge between his native Africa, Europe and the United States, his adopted lands, Moh! sets it up, or rather the arpeggio, in sensitive strings and warm trumpet blasts. Woody ballads on cello and copper caresses (Faloufema) to evoke the soul mate, or in unison with the kora on Miyabélé (reprise of a title by the little-known Bah Sadio, a Guinean Peuhl singer who died in France in the 70s), Moh! vogue, slow tempo, on the banks of the Niger, according to the mouths and without a precise destination. A nomadic manifesto to put an end to no man’s land.