Sia Tolno was born 1975 in Guéckédou, Guinea, but grew up in Freetown, Sier… Read Full Bio ↴Sia Tolno was born 1975 in Guéckédou, Guinea, but grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She was born as a KIssi, a tribal group divided over the borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Her father tought her French and pidgin-English, She was treated harsly as a child, but her writing and poetry helped her to carry on. Then, just as she was wondering whether to study IT or drama, she found herself caught up in the war. She was twenty when the forces commanded by Liberia’s Charles Taylor plunged the region into bloody conflict. In desperation, she fled to Guinea, although she barely knew her family there and did not speak French.
So Sia Tolno decided to become an artist. She settled in Conakry and sang in its bars and night clubs. She describes this period of cigarettes, liquor and empty pockets in Malaya, a very soul number from her second album, My Life.
n 2008, she represented her country in the first series of Africa Star (the Pan-African version of Making a Music Star), held in Gabon. Among the judges were the great musician and composer Pierre Akendengue and his new producer, José da Silva, who worked with Cesaria Evora. Akendengue was impressed: the young woman had a remarkable voice. When Sia Tolno released her first international album, Eh Sanga, in 2009 on the Lusafrica label, Guinea was again in the grip of civil unrest.
In 2011, she released her second album, My Life, which was recorded at the studio's of Mory Kante in Conakry. Traditional instruments and rhythms mix freely with sounds and ideas from the present day and Tolno, singing alternately in the minority Guinean Kissi language, English and French, belts it out in appealingly husky style. The musical backing largely stays away from programming and canned beats, a natural approach suiting Tolno’s similarly earthy pipes. Some songs address hardships of African life that Tolno has experienced or witnessed, but there’s an ample amount of danceable arrangements to keep things from wallowing.
In 2014, her third album "African Woman" was released, produced by Tony Allen.
She won the RFI Prix Dçouverte in 2011.