In this 2008 interview band member Barthélemy Attisso discusses his self-taught method of becoming a professional musician:
What happened was, when I decided to devote myself to learning the guitar, I quit my day job and used my last paycheck to buy a guitar and an instruction book. I went back home and devoted myself to learning the guitar using this book. I'd quit teaching by that point.
From the book I learned the chords and a few of the notes. Then, what I started to do was record music on the radio-- this was all local musicians and orchestras. And I would play it over and over again, because at that point what I was really interested in was accompaniment. So I would listen to the music from the radio and accompany the singer on the recording.
Once I had sort of gotten a handle on playing with the recordings, I would go to some of the local nightclubs and actually listen at the door, and what I was really listening for was how [the guitarists] were accompanying the singers. So I would hang out outside and listen, and then I would go home and practice and see if I could re-create what I had heard.
There were a lot of nightclubs at that time. There was the Star, which was one of the biggest, the Palladium, the Calypso. I went to all of these, and I would listen to the guitar, and how it accompanied the singer. And I really learned how play behind a singer the way it was supposed to be done.
Attisso still mixes his Orchestra duties and touring with his law practice work in Lomé, the Togolese capital.
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