Listen… OKA!

We’ve heard plenty of examples of Bayaka pygmy music in its pure unadulterated state. We’ve also heard it expertly incorporated into ensemble playing with Western instrumentation in the excellent recordings of the groups Baka Beyond and Baka Gbine. Some of the music on this album takes a slightly different approach. Chris Berry is an American multi– instrumentalist and engineer who took sophisticated recording equipment to the remote tropical forests of the Central African Republic. Here he recorded Bayaka vocalists and then, employing multi-tracking techniques, encouraged the villagers to overdub themselves in multiple layers, a new experience to the comparatively remote and primitive Bayaka. The concept produced a positive effect on the performers who were able to rearrange, recompose and expand their music – all with Berry’s co-compositional and technical skills. It’s these vocal experimentations that are the most successful tracks on this album, particularly the female examples. On other tracks Berry has recorded musical interludes, snippets of local wildlife, and some fusions of Bayaka tradition overlaid with synthesized percussion and keyboard – a couple of which are less successful and rather incongruous to the organic nature of the rest of the music on an otherwise excellent collection.

The interludes are all useful fills for the soundtrack of director Lavinia Currier’s enjoyable film OKA! The film loosely interprets the true story of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, who lived for three decades with the Bayaka hunter-gatherer community, recording their music. British actor Kris Marshall is affable in the lead role, portraying an obsessed geeky American with a failing medical condition who refuses to give up his quest to comprehensively document Bayaka music. Rather than Fitzcarraldo’s demonic obsessive, this is a klutzy well-intentioned character who finds affection, inspiration and a bit of romance within his occasionally mystical relationship with his adopted tribe. Although the storyline is slightly thin and the characterisations stereotyped there is some delightful and incisive footage of the Bayaka and their native habitat.