Kristo Numpuby

Born in Paris, Kristo Numpuby grew up in Eséka, Cameroon. After a youth in which he learned to play the guitar and obtained his baccalaureate, he returned to the French capital to study communications. Just as he was starting out in his professional life, Kristo Numpuby made a U-turn and returned to his first passion: music. Starting out as a bassist for singer Aïcha Koné, he went on to meet a number of artists, including Stevie Wonder, and decided to record his own compositions. Inspired by the Assiko rhythm, a traditional Cameroonian musical genre and dance, he launched his career in 1997 with his first album, Assiko City. Kristo Numpuby's live performance of this album made him a household name, and he followed this up four years later with An Sol Mè (2001). But it was with a cover of a classic French singer that the musician won over his French-speaking audience: when he chose to reinterpret the music of Georges Brassens, drawing inspiration from the traditional rhythms of his country (the 2007 album Brassens En Afrique ), Kristo Numpuby became an example of the cross-fertilization present in music. An international advocate of the music of his childhood, he pays tribute to it on a fourth album, Assiko Land (2014), with explicit titles such as "African Magic Music", then in 2021 on his fifth instrumental album, Tafel.

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