“I met the founders of the group, the people who had the contracts at the time, what more do you want me to tell you? Obviously, I cannot meet everyone. “I have all the permissions, all the contracts,” he told VOA. He claims to have followed all the necessary steps. The French producer denies these allegations. Nor did he call me, or say anything else,' Traoré said. “He took a recording of our boss, Tanou Bassoumalo, an old recording, and told me he would see if he can recover the tracks and fix them. He gave me 200,000 CFA francs (around $380) that day,” Nouhoun Traoré recalls. When he came for the book, my son asked him for a gift for me. “What he is doing now is not what he offered me. Nouhoun Traore, of the 'Echo Del Africa' band. His account was backed up by Nouhoun Traoré Banakourou, saxophonist and guitarist of the group Echo Del Africa, who acknowledged that he worked with Mazzoleni on a book project, but not a compilation. But when it comes to producing a compilation or stuff like that, we've never talked about that, never, never, ever,” Soré, of Volta Jazz, said. We understood he was going to make a book of the history of our music.

“All I know, there was this white guy who came here he tried to get information on what life was like in the orchestras of the old days. They pointed out that when they met him, he talked only about a book project. “People recorded with what they could get and yet they managed to create one of the most fascinating modern music of the continent,' Mazzoleni said.īut the artists themselves are not happy, saying he has been unfair to them. Mazzoleni said he wanted “to pay tribute to all those people in the shadows, who made the culture of Bobo-Dioulasso.”Īt the time, he said, Upper Volta was a poor country with limited ability for people to communicate with the outside world or record music. “These are artists that I have always admired and I wrote about 20 books on African music, including a book in 2015 called ‘Burkina Faso Modern Music Voltaic,’” Mazzoleni said in a phone interview. It turns out French music producer Florent Mazzoleni made the compilation produced by The Numero Group, a Chicago-based production company. The news of the Grammy nomination surprised the musicians, who wondered how their music was put on CDs and distributed worldwide without their knowledge or consent. It is a compilation of recordings in the 1970s in Bobo, second-largest city of Burkina Faso, then known as Upper Volta.

Soré is a member of the Volta Jazz group, whose songs are part of the album titled “Bobo Yeye, Belle époque in Upper Volta,” which is nominated for two Grammy Awards. “As a musician, I am totally disappointed to learn that we have spent time moaning, suffering and that someone else can just make a compilation of our music and that it is going for an award,” musician Stanislas Soré told VOA French to Africa Service on Friday.

Instead, musicians based in Bobo-Dioulasso, whose work is featured on the three-disk compilation “Bobo Yeye,” didn’t even know they had been nominated or that the album even existed. For musicians from the West African nation of Burkina Faso, a nomination for a Grammy Award should have been the crowning achievement of a musical career.

Belle epoque in upper volta