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“Praefatio” is the debut album by Congolese singer Céline Banza.
© Bomayé Musik
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Winner of the 2019 RFI Discovery Award, the young Congolese singer Céline Banza offers a first acoustic album entitled Preface, all in raw emotion and in contrast with the stereotypes which stick to the music of his country.
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In Burkina Faso, this January 9, Céline Banza has just resumed on the African continent the thread of her tour interrupted last April due to a pandemic after only a few concerts which had taken her to the islands of the Indian Ocean.
The experience had been short-lived but the sequence of performances in different countries had already allowed her to discover that the life of a musician, in the real world, did not quite correspond to what she imagined. “I quickly understood that I had to save my energy for the stage”, she concedes.
In the meantime, the young 23-year-old artist, who received her prize in Kinshasa last December and played on this occasion in front of his compatriots, spent time in the studio in the capital of the DRC to regroup some of his songs within Preface, so titled in memory of his Latin studies. A preface, therefore, as an introduction to his universe, before presenting other chapters in the future.
“This album was written and composed for almost five years (or has it always been?)”, she writes on her Facebook page, even though she acknowledges that her oldest pieces have been left out, to preserve a form of unity of time in her inspiration, which corresponds to her last years in the Congolese megalopolis.
Music or nothing
During this phase, she went from dream to reality. Has given himself the means to realize his deep, vital desires. His determination is beyond doubt. “It was music or nothing”, often repeats the one who was orphaned very early. Laughing, she tells how she took in the pocket of her “papa” adopted Antoine Ndongala, head of the Kabako studio in Kinsangani (and son of the founder of the group Singa Mwambe), the dollars needed to fly to Kin before leaving him a letter explaining his departure.
Enrolled in the National Institute of the Arts, she learned classical guitar there (“I wasn’t too much of a fan, I wanted to play songs”), obtains her ethnomusicologist diploma and evolves in the artistic world, all disciplines combined – in the spirit of what she had known in Kisangani, surrounded by choreographers and rappers as a reconstituted family.
After his appearance in 2017 in the show The Voice Francophone Africa, where she joined the team coached by A’Salfo from Magic System, she played the main role in the short film Tamuzi, then is asked by Fabrice Mukala to compose a song intended to accompany his play Three angry women. Céline, reading the script, writes Tere Mbi. With her only guitar, she sings between anger and sadness this text which evokes the body of women as a limit, vis-à-vis men as vis-à-vis themselves.
It is also one of the songs that she chose to record in 2019 to apply for the RFI Découvertes Prize competition, in which she began to take an interest in discussing with the Malagasy singer Kristel, passing through the DRC, then with Yvan Buravan, winner of the 2018 edition.
Afro-people minimalist
At home, the song does not go unnoticed. While Congolese music suffers from a form of formatting, Céline frees herself from these heaviness, including on the visual level, not hesitating to shoot her clip in real Kinshasa and not in a setting of fantasized luxury.
Its minimalist afro-folk need no unnecessary frills. Preface is in line with this same perspective: rather than submitting her songs to a dress-up session by trying them out in different versions, she privileged instantaneity, the primary spirit.
Through the album, she continues to break the codes. In Lingala spoken in the capital and by many of her compatriots, she preferred Ngbandi from her origins, but also shows all her ease in writing in French in On the pavement, telling in the first person the story of an eight-year-old child on his own.
And when she shares the microphone on one side with the illustrious Youssoupha (Departure), on the other hand, she invites a close friend, with no proven link with the world of music (Rain). The approach, unique, reflects the aspirations of the singer: not to refuse anything a priori, stay as close as possible to his emotions. To better transmit them and reduce the distance.
Celine Banza Preface (Bomayé Musik) 2021
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