It is by listening to her last album “Lucid” that we measure how much we had missed Aṣa (pronounced A-Cha). The album of maturity but also the start of a new life for this very young forty.
How to forget this young singer who appeared in 2007? How can we forget this sweet and tormented voice that gracefully settles on an original arrangement of folk, reggae, afrobeat and soul, carrying torrents of emotion in its path? As soon as her first album was released, “Fire on the Mountain” was on every playlist. The album is certified platinum: Aṣa quietly but directly enters the big league. But who is this young woman with the bowler hat and the big glasses? A girl born in Paris in 1982 to Nigerian parents. But it is in Lagos, where her parents settled, two years after her birth, that Aṣa will awaken to music. In contact with the very rich family record library that goes from Marvin Gaye to Fela (this is Nigeria) through Bob Marley or Nina Simone. His instrument is the guitar. His subject? It’s life, her own but also that of others, whether she sings in English or in Yoruba.
It is precisely life that, in recent years, has caught up with Aṣa, life that has absorbed her to the point that she is absent from music. Today she returns to it loaded with vital experiences, and emotions always. Wounded, but rebuilt, driven by a fierce will to compose, to sing and to share with us. One foot in Lagos, one foot in Paris where she recorded “Lucid”. A pure wonder.
Crédit photo © DR
Asa : vocals
Ujunwa Janet Nwose : choir
Stéphane Bertin : guitar
Ludovic Fiers : keyboards
Kevin Reveyrand : bass
Jean-François Ludovicus : drums