{"id":110122,"date":"2022-07-12T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T09:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/eugene-mona-une-comete-dans-le-ciel-antillais\/"},"modified":"2022-07-12T17:25:59","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T15:25:59","slug":"eugene-mona-a-comet-in-caribbean-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/eugene-mona-a-comet-in-caribbean-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Eug\u00e8ne Mona: A comet in Caribbean skies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“I ask all those who like my music, a different kind of music, to give me a little money, just enough to prevent you from going out on a Saturday night, so that I can launch a big band worthy of representing Martinique in Europe”.  <\/em>This request<\/a>, made by Eug\u00e8ne Mona live on radio RFO, did not have the desired results : not a single penny was put in the three large urns set aside for the occasion.  “He suffered a great deal for his music. Too often, doors were closed to him”, <\/em>confides his widow Martiane Bizet Siano in Nathalie Glaudon\u2019s excellent documentary. Several days later, the man who embodied the soul of the people died in his prime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From Marigot to Martinique\u2019s mountainous regions<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

He was born 48 years earlier, on July 13, 1943, in Vauclin, a small rural community in Martinique. The little boy, whose legal name was Georges Nilecam, which he later changed when he found his true self, and after having been given many nicknames as a child, grew up with his father, an amateur accordeonist, who gave him his first rudiments in music. “I am a child from Marigot who wants to attain the universal\u2026 It\u2019s possible, isn\u2019t it ?”, <\/em>he would later say.  In the meantime, despite his talent as a singer that was already evident in his teens, the future flutist soon took a different path: he worked as an agricultural labourer.  Then he turned to carpentry, an activity that by all accounts he excelled in. “At the age of fifteen I didn\u2019t know how to read or write. A the age of twenty-five I could read and write music”, <\/em>he said on the French TV music show Megamix in 1990.  Starting from scratch, he showed true strength of character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Music score, Bwa Bril\u00e9<\/em>, words and music by Eug\u00e8ne Mona, 1973 \u00a9 Sacem Archives*<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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If the texture of his voice was proof of his exceptional talent, the man who soon became known simply as “Mona” encountered another self-taught musician with a bright future: Max Cilla<\/a>, who had chosen in the 1960\u2019s to retreat to to the mountains and make flutes based on India\u2019s ancestral tradition; he gave Mona one of his bamboo flutes, on which his disciple would compose haunting melodies. This encounter proved decisive<\/a>. Later on in the 1960\u2019s Mona won a prize in a Creole song competition. This launched his career, and he recorded his first album the year he turned thirty, in 1973. Bwa Bril\u00e9, <\/em>recorded with his group of musicians from Marigot, was a success for the man considered to be the worthy successor of Ti Emile. But Mona added other spices to the traditional formula, revealing his own original personality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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