Yamê, a geek between rap and singing at the opening of the festival

2023-12-06 18:00:11
Yamê, in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), September 18, 2023. OJOZ

During the 45th edition of the Trans Musicales de Rennes, which takes place from December 6 to 10, the Théâtre L’Aire libre once again offers its space for musical creation to an artist on whom the festival has great hopes. After the Belgian-Congolese Lous and the Yakuza in 2019 or the singer from Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique) Zaho de Sagazan in 2022, it is the turn of the Franco-Cameroonian Yamê to play every evening. The rapper learned his lessons in the soul, rap and jazz jams of Paris, while drawing inspiration from bassist Richard Bona as well as Canadian R’n’B singer Daniel Caesar and Congolese Papa Wemba. His first album, released in mid-October, El (DBS Records/Naïve), mixes high-pitched vocals and flow rap, metaphorical writing inspired by video games and texts nourished by slang, Cameroonian and Parisian titi.

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An hour before the last departure for his concert at the Trans Musicales, the pianist and singer closes the window of his dressing room and jokes: “Planes make too much noise. We are really at the end of the runway at Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande airport, in Rennes. If a plane misses its landing, it’s for theater! » As a child, he missed his gliding flight in the family home in Cergy-Pontoise, in Val-d’Oise, where he was born. On the stairs, he broke two baby teeth, the front ones, which never grew back. And here he is, at 30 years old, adorned with the look of a toothless buccaneer, which ultimately suits him: “I gave up on having my teeth done when I was presented with the list of work”, he specifies. In June, when the Berlin music platform Colors Show dedicated a video to him for his title Bike – “a metaphor for freedom”he says –, Internet users are as excited by his look as by his music, to which he devoted himself around the age of 20.

However, he had everything going for him to start sooner. His father, Ngoup’Emanty, is a famous musician in Cameroon, who moved his entire family to Douala when his son, Emmanuel, was 5 years old: “Over there, at school, he says, children learn piano in music class. So I started playing it. At home, there was a studio with lots of instruments that I tried, but it was the piano that really appealed to me. I even wrote a little sequence of chords. » At the age of 10, after the sudden death of his mother, a computer scientist, he returned to Paris with his father and sister.

Viking warriors and rumba by Papa Wemba

The child first takes refuge in video games, in the worlds of Greek or Nordic mythology which, for example, the game publishers are fond of. Assassin’s Creed. In his album, he devotes a soaring and powerful piece to it, Call of Valhalla, the cemetery of Viking warriors. He listens to music on the platforms: rap, soul, but also the jazz of Richard Bona, the rumba of Papa Wemba. He covers the songs of the Canadian Daniel Caesar on the piano, who has a high voice like him, tries out different versions on chords by Marcus Miller, but still has no desire to make music his profession.

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