"Boulez Boulez"

Baka Beyond is more than a musical group.  They are an experience, a mission, and a project with many more facets than just the next concert tour or CD release.  Founder Martin Craddick has been returning to the forest of Cameroon—home of his beloved Baka muses—for 13 years, and by now, the place has become his second home.  In fact, he and his band mates have even build a home of sorts there, a Music House constructed from a single, enormous tree.  The so-called Music Mongulu is used for rehearsing, performing, and recording, including music for this the group’s sixth CD release, named for that giant tree.  As admirable as Baka’s efforts to give back to their sources are, the music they make is enough to admire on its own.  Baka Beyond delivers more substance within the vaguely defined genre of “Afro-Celtic” music than any group out there, and they don’t even rely on that tempting catch phrase.

The CD begins and ends with the plaintive sound of a Buka woman singing hocketing yelli—the quintessential Cameroonian forest warble—with the dense, buzzing whir of insects painting a picture of remote, teeming life.  In between those far-flung African bookends are eight remarkable songs that seamlessly blend Gaelic, Celtic, Congolese and Cameroonian traditions.  “Sad Among Strangers” a walking song from the Scottish isles, dovetails comfortably into tumbling percussion.  Similarly, “Hush Hush” transports a 19^th century Scottish lament to a 21^st century rain forest.  “Kobo” and “La Londé” (a Baka childrens’ song) feature the group’s trademark acoustic boogie, a kind of folksy windup of Congolese clave beat, often featuring nimble guitar work from Craddick.

“Boulez Boulez” departs from that formula working around a guitar riff based on a 6/8 forest rhythm and grounded in a splendid polyrhythmic bass line from Sam Djengue, and topped with tasty Celtic fiddle from Paddy Le Mercier.  “The Rhythm Tree” builds around yelli singing recorded in the Music Mongulu, but combined with mouth bow, loping bass, and a moody, textured groove of voices, strings, and flute, it becomes jam band heaven.  The skilled Celtic voices of Su Hart and Denise Rowe work surprisingly well in African contexts.  Maybe there’s some mysterious historic logic to the blend, or maybe it’s just that these musicians have spent enough time sitting around night fires in the Cameroonian bush, making music with the locals, that they’ve cracked each others’ codes.  In any case, it is rare that musicians from five different countries get together and make music so naturally flowing and free of cross-cultural awkwardness.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org