Brice Wassy

Born in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon on 14 November, 1958, Brice Wassy is a 'Bamileke', which is to say from the commercial elite of West Cameroon. By the age of five, Brice was already playing in a fifteen piece school band and he's been constantly involved with music ever since. Wassy is perhaps the leading exponents of the 6/8 rhythms which dominate African dance music and fascinate Jazz musicians, but he didn't start out playing traditional forms.
 "I started playing along on the saucepans to 'What I Say' by Ray Charles and went straight into drum kit. Growing up right in the middle of the colonial period, we listened to French and American music on the radio: James Brown; Otis Redding; Wilson Pickett. Playing with school bands, we played all covers: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Simon & Garfunkel... At that time, traditional music was heard only at funerals. My generation wasn't interested in anything traditional. Fela was the one to change all this. He opened our minds with the militancy of his message and our hearts to the rhythms of Afrobeat."
 Moving to Paris in 1974 to be with his father, big brother and little sister, Brice was impressed by the giant of the jazz/rock fusion era. "I wanted to play like Tony Williams, Steve Gadd, guys like that. You know, it was incredible how Billy Cobham did his rolls. Technique is very important, but at a certain point you must start playing your own music and, eventually I realised that I had something different of my own," he says. "Groove is what interests me." These days, Brice cites Paco Serry from the Ivory Coast and one of the creators of Nigerian Afrobeat, Tony Allen, as his favourite drummers.
 Through his big brother, Brice met Wally Bardarou and worked with him before meeting his 'spiritual father', Manu Dibango, with whom he worked for six years, first as drummer, then as Musical Director. Brice traces the moment he found his own distinctive voice as a drummer to the 1981 sessions for Manu's Waka Juju album: "It was this song, Mangambolo, that people started to get interested in me and I got the title, 'King of 6/8'. Then people started to tell me that jazz/rock wasn't my thing and I started to work on my sound and research music from Cameroon; to find my roots... I play jazz because I understand that music. I'm saying: in traditional music you are improvising. So, if jazz means improvising, traditional music is jazz."
 As the acknowledged King of 6/8, Brice has been the most in-demand drummer on the African and World circuit since the early 1980s, playing with (among others): Pierre Akendengue (Gabon), Francis Bebery (Cameroon), Uta Bella (Cameroon), and Toure Kunda (Senegal). In 1984, Monsieur Wassy became Salif Keita's band leader, recording the marvellous Soro album and staying with him for six years. In 1990, he met Jean-Luc Ponty, who came to Paris looking for an encounter with African music. Brice took the opportunity to bring together some of the best Paris-based African musicians and co-produced the album, which came to bear the name of one of his compositions, 'Tchokola'.
In the mid 90s, Brice recorded his first solo album, N'ga Funk, independently, and it was distributed in France by Night & Day before being picked up by M.E.L.T.2000 (then B&W Music), remixed and re-released in 1996. As a member of the M.E.L.T. musical family, Brice spent the Summer of '96 at Brownhill Farm working with Amampondo, taking the traditional South African ensemble into a totally contemporary dimension, and a collaborative project between Madala Kunene, Mabi Gabriel Thobejane and 'Doc' Mthalene.
Brice toured with his Tchokola Band and to play out in Paris wherever a gig can be found for his 12 piece Art Sound Orchestra, which featured American expatriates Mike Ellis on sax and Matthew Russell on flute. Then there's Tam Tam L'Europe, Francis Lassus' nine member 'drum orchestra': "We tuned to E major and, like an orchestra, we had different types of drum sets, with pots and pans and cooking implements, the jungle drums, the melody drum, the bass kit, the gimmick drums, etc..."
 When in Lagos, Nigeria, while touring with Miriam Makeba back in 1992, Brice took the opportunity to visit the Shrine Club, home of his hero, Fela Kuti. "Fela was a big influence on me, because he opened our minds. In Africa, we were playing American music before Fela showed us the way. It was at The Shrine, which is an oasis of freedom and humanity in the midst of one of Africa's most violent cities, that Brice experienced a kind of rhythmic revelation which provided the inspiration for his new album, Shrine Dance(BW089).
 Arriving at the club around ten o'clock, Fela's band were onstage, but the man himself was not there. When he finally turned up at two in the morning, the music stopped and Fela came onstage like a champion boxer entering the ring. The atmosphere intensified as the great man smoked a big joint, surveying the crowd, before at last he gave a signal to his drummer to start the dance. "I've never seen anything like it, in Africa or anywhere," says Brice. "The power of the performance and the way in which it involved everybody in the place. It was profound!"