| BAKA BEYOND INTERVIEW |
| Baka Beyond makes a sonic quilt
of cultures Publish Date: 21-Apr-2005 In the city, sonic survival requires screening out most of the noises—sirens, traffic, barking dogs, boomboxes, drills, blowers, mowers—that accompany our lives. But in the dense rainforests of southern Cameroon, where thick foliage obscures every view, the Baka people have learned to be aware of every noise, which may tell them something important about what’s happening around them. As a result the Baka are extraordinarily fine listeners and have developed a wide-ranging aural culture, which includes sophisticated traditions of music-making. The complexities of Pygmy music have been known in the West since anthropologist Colin Turnbull made field recordings of the Baka in the 1950s. While watching a TV documentary about the tribe in the late ’80s, English guitarist Martin Cradick started playing along with the amazing rhythms he heard. Immediately he wrote a song called “Baka”, which became the title track for a successful album by his world-music fusion band Outback. Cradick wanted to visit the Baka in their forests, but it seemed an impossible dream. “Then a whole series of coincidences fell into place so that a few years later I found myself there,” says Cradick, on the line from Bath, England. “I played with the Baka a lot, and recorded what we did, and their own music. Then I came back here, Outback split up, and I worked with these recordings and put out Spirit of the Forest, based on what we’d done together, and Heart of the Forest, my field recordings. The albums sold really well, especially in the US.” “Suddenly I’d got all this money that belonged to the Baka, so I kept going back to find out what they wanted to do with it, and set up a charity,” Cradick continues. “One of the things they asked for is a music house—a community place where they can make and record music—and so together we built one in the forest a few years ago. I’ve just come back from there again, where I did a load of recording on multi-track of their music—particularly some of their guitar music.” In the early ’90s, inspired by his experiences in Africa, Cradick formed a band with his wife, singer Su Hart, and his longtime musical partner, Breton fiddler Paddy Le Mercier, to play a unique fusion of African and Celtic music. Baka Beyond—which makes its debut in Vancouver this Friday (April 22) at the Croatian Cultural Centre, as part of the Global Discoveries Festival—has released a string of acclaimed albums. The current line-up of the seven-piece touring outfit includes Afro-English singer and dancer Denise Rowe, Cameroonian bassist Sam Djengue, and West African percussionists Nii Tagoe and Seckou Keita. Some of Baka Beyond’s material consists of Gaelic songs and mouth-music played with an African undertow; some of it uses the basic rhythmic and melodic structures of Baka music to launch into original Afro-Celtic grooves. The sound is mainly acoustic and doesn’t involve synthesizers, loops, or samples. “On our latest album, Rhythm Tree, there are a few songs we learned from the Baka,” says Cradick. “It’s joyous, uplifting, lively stuff. I think the mistake a lot of people make in mixing styles of music is to do it through formulae. We’re an African-Celtic cross-over band because we’ve got Africans playing their rhythms and people from Celtic traditions doing their stuff. We just need to listen to each other. It’s as simple as that really.” |