Ambasse bey

Music of Cameroon

Bamileke drummers
Genres
Specific forms
Regional music

Ambasse bey or ambas-i-bay is a style of folk music and dance from Cameroon. The music is based on commonly available instruments, especially guitar, with percussion provided by sticks and bottles.[1] The music is faster-paced than assiko, an older form of Cameroonian popular folk music.[2]

Ambasse bey originated among the Yabassi ethnic group[3] and grew popular in Douala after World War II. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the style evolved in the Cameroonian Littoral. In the mid-1960s, Eboa Lotin performed a style of ambasse bey on harmonica and guitar that was the earliest form of makossa, a style that quickly came to overshadow its predecessor and become Cameroon's most popular form of indigenous music.[4] Ambasse bey was revived to an extent by Cameroonian singer Sallé John.[5]

Notes

  1. Mbaku 197.
  2. Hudgens and Trillo 1183.
  3. Guide touristique 131.
  4. Mbaku 197–8.
  5. DeLancey and DeLancey 184.

References


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