It's taken me 20 years to write two, so I'm impressed. And through that, I started gaining access to the music as well that was being made in Bobo-Dioulasso at the time, music by the likes of Volta Jazz, and Les Imbattables Leopards, and Dafra Star, and Echo Del Africa National.īasically, this was the soundtrack to Sory Sanlé’s pictures, so I approached Numero Group a few years ago telling them that there was quite a story to be told and that's how the whole CD Bobo Yéyé happened. In the end, I ended up working with him for the last four or five years, and going through his extensive vaults, which includes about 200,000 negatives. Luckily enough, I managed to save a few boxes of negatives, and I went back to the place where I was staying and spent a few nights looking at the negatives, and I found there was quite something there. He was saying, 'Oh, ca c’est les vieux choses.” That is old stuff. The first time I met him, he was just outside his tiny photo studio, and he was burning some of his old archives and negatives. So I went two or three times to Bobo, and I finally managed to find him. I was looking for Sory Sanlé because I knew he had made some very nice record covers for Volta Jazz back in the ‘60s. I have done a lot of compilations and reissue work, and while doing research in Burkina Faso a few years ago, I first met the great singer Amadou Ballaké, and also Sory Sanlé, a kind of unsung photographer from Bobo-Dioulasso, which is further south than the capital city, Ouagadougou. So it started like that, and then around 2007, I started writing my first book on African music, and I've written about 10 more books on the subject, dedicating books to Ghana music, Burkina Faso music, Mali music, as well as Benin music, which came out last year.

I produced their new album, Madjafalao, which is coming out next month.

And the more I came back to Africa, the more I fell in love with the different kinds of music from the continent, and I was lucky enough to meet all those great artists, be they Bembeya Jazz or Amadou Balaké or the guys from Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. I used to be a journalist for many years, and when I first traveled to Africa in the early 2000s, I got a chance to spend time with Mahmoud Ahmed in Ethiopia, Cesaria Evora in Cabo Verde, Ali Farka Toure in Mali, so that's where my passion for African music. Introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work and how you came to this project.įlorent Mazzoleni: I am a French writer. 6 to discuss Bobo Yéyé and other projects for the program “Off the Beaten Track in Malawi and Burkina Faso” Here’s their conversation.īanning Eyre: Let's begin at the beginning. Afropop’s Banning Eyre reached Florent by Skype in Bordeaux on Sept. Florent has a deep commitment to documenting and preserving West African music from the 1960s and '70s-for many, a golden age.

He recently compiled a three-CD box set of classic tracks from Bobo Dioulaso, the second city in Burkina Faso: Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta (out Oct. Florent Mazzoleni is a journalist, author, vinyl collector and record producer based in Bordeaux, France, with a longstanding focus on African music.

Belle epoque upper volta