Victor Deme
Deli

How can one not love this artist, seen for the first time by pure chance on YouTube, to help you here is the link.

Immersed in thousands of CDs, stunned by guitars, drums, electronic effects, screams, and laments, sometimes the right song to bring music back to its primary importance seems to arrive almost by chance. This is how the love for this charming character was born, who coincidentally releases his second studio effort these days. Needless to say, I rushed to buy the album and learn about this African man's story, a fifty-year-old with few teeth but with so much, so much musical genuineness to give.

Thus, I discover his story, his work as a musician in Burkina Faso who played in his country for thirty years away from the spotlight, only to be catapulted at 47 onto a plane and fly for the first time in his life to Paris for his first European concert. It's the beginning of a small success in France, leading him to record his first album, award-winning and best-selling across the Alps. Now everyone wants him, and everyone seeks him out. Deme sees money that he had never seen before, and with great generosity and humility, he uses it for good works in his impoverished land. When it comes time to record this second work, he is offered luxurious recording studios in Paris and London, but with a great attachment to his roots, he decides to record it at home, among his people and family. In a world where people would go to great lengths for the so-called "big break," a small demonstration of humility and consistency is always striking but positive and exemplary.

Victor Deme knows how to write songs and remarkably blend American folk blues with Mandinga music. His songs know how to touch the emotional chord, they can be sad but full of hope and joy of living that perhaps the Western world has long, too long, lost. Raising one's children, and Deme has six, according to the respect and traditions of his people is still a value that is sung in "Mèka Dèen." In "Sèrè Jugu", the American Delta blues perfectly marries African sounds just as in Kèeba Sekouma, a song dedicated to the "modern man." Incredible Western hints in Morricone's style, much loved by Deme, in "Mais où sont les dollars" and "Maa Gaafora" and trombones and saxophones in "Ma Belle", the album is a blossoming of sounds, never too invasive, that knows how to accompany Victor's singing. "Sina" is a little gem, enriched by a beautiful gypsy violin that so much reminds me of Bob Dylan's Desire. Accompanied by African musicians with their traditional instruments, this work knows how to cradle the listener, catapulting him into dusty streets, surrounded by vegetation and brick and mud houses, where Victor Deme, when he is not roaming the world to play, loves to return with the hope of giving dignity to his family's life. A rare example of how one can, after years of sacrifice, achieve success and money, using it to improve one's life and not ruin it.

Always stay the way you are, Victor, you who can succeed and do so.