Baka Beyond, The Tower, Winchester 11/11/98
African Swing
A backdrop has been hung down the back wall of the Tower. The image is a leafy glade, a take on Shakespeare's Midsummer's Nights Dream. Stage smoke is blowing around the instruments. The audience begins to fill up the this unique, octagonal theatre.
The stage area, or flat floor before us is covered with matting. Instruments are everywhere. Guitars, a violin, drumset, twin congas and hand drums plus four microphones up front. It is after eight, no band but the manager is bringing more chairs in to seat an audience deserting the bar for the auditorium. Still no band.
Expectations raise when the manager comes to the central mike. He apologises, the band is here but "Just having something to eat so they'll be about five minutes, ok." Then he turns the delay into a chance to apologise for an occurence with a tribute band recently.
The manager discovers one lady in the audience who came to see Fleetwood Bac. Thanks her for returning tonight. As the story goes, the audience that night were sat on their hands till ten o'clock waiting for the band to show. "They thought they were Fleetwood Mac, I think, they wanted to act the rock star lifestyle . . ." jokes the manager. "But that's all Rumours," he adds.
It was Don Van Vliet who said he and his band needed good food in order to play their music. So I am unbothered to sit and wait while they fill their stomachs and get sorted. I remember hearing Baka Beyond on a pub stereo awhile ago. I wasn't really listening that night. The music didn't sink in. Tonight I am postively drowning in it.
Duly on time to the manager's announcement Baka Beyond amble out into the auditorium.
The dress sense is positively theatrical. Captain Beefheart's Magic Band revisited or Captain Cat and the Pudding Pirates at least. Stage left is a guy who looks like he should be in the film Still Crazy. A mass of split ended hair almost covering his blackened eyes that look devoid of sleep. He's wearing a pair of red striped drainpipe trousers haphazardly tucked into the wierdest pair of down at heel cowboy boots I've seen in a long while. Something like a cross between a Carrabean pirate and the Milky Bar Kid. Around his neck hangs a long white scarf which gives him an air of a wayward Biggles. Where he left his plane, is anybody's guess. Probably in the hedge his hair went through. This is French violinist Paddy Le Mercier.
Stage right is a guy from Ghana in a patchwork, sleeveless shirt. By comparison his hair is wrapped in African curls tight to his head. This is the conga player with an unpronounceable name. The drummer is from Senegal and the bass player, Mark Pinto is from South London. Dapper looking dudes, particularly the drummer in one of those thick cotton tribal shirts.
The guitarist is Martin Cradick. Being English or Australian, I can't decide but he has his jungle jacket on, topped off by a pair of black and white striped pyjamas falling over baseball boots.
Stage middle are the vocalists, both barefooted, Sue Hart and a lady who I didn't catch the name of. Sue Hart is wearing a pair of pinky PVC trousers and a midriff jumper. The young lady next to her has a long mane of red hair running down her back streaked with strands of black. She's wearing pyschedelic trousers. There can't be a male in the audience that wouldn't make room for her in his tent at Glastonbury.
The music came as colourful as their dress sense. The kind of African highlife rhythm that makes it impossible not to kick your feet to. By the second set the usually reserved Winchester audiences had abandoned their seats to dance out front. Me I sat there right in front a few feet from the band till the encore then I had to get up and give it a go.
The music of Baka Beyond has been inspired by the Baka pygmies of Cameroon on the West Coast of Africa. Both Cradick and Hart started spending winters there from 1992 living with the natives in the ancient hunter gatherer tradition. Right smack in the remote rain forests. Soaking up traditions handed down centuries. Picking up on a music older than the blues and every Western music that this small area has probably influenced in the twentieth century.
Cradick and Hart have embraced these people and the region as a personal crusade. They have not only made field recordings of the music in situ but set up a registered charity, One Heart, to record the music of an endangered community and give something back to its people. Dignity.
Meanwhile Western Banks continue to charge interest on the debts, the British and French are logging the jungle, disturbing its wildlife and gradually forcing the Baka people to give up their nomadic hunter gatherer existence and live in villages. Reminds me alot of Penelope Swales defence of the aborgine's in Australia.
So that's the background to tonight's music. To these ears it sounds like the source of so much. In the myriad of cross rhythms between congas, drums, bass, guitars, violin and sticks tonight I hear the influences on everything from the field holler blues of Mississippi to the slam dunkin' rap out of Los Angeles.
Boy does this stuff fire you up. Cradick's jangling, high stepping flat plucked guitar lines drive the beat right down to your toes. Beautiful snatches of melody as inviting as a campfire. Driving chords, like Django gone Calypso and then some phase effects that end up sounding like Hank Marvin would if donned a pith helmet.
Add to this Paddy Le Mercier's stunning violin. Must be a French Irishman with a name like that. He created not only a snorting elephant in the jungle but slipped in Scottish reels, Irish jigs and some stuff which was straight out of the David LaFlamme West Coast violin territory. He also played Irish whistle and various wierd looking recorders. Phew.
I know a few drummers who would have had their jaws on the floor, along with mine just gaping at what the rhythm section laid down. Some of my favourite drummers, Dannie Richmond (Charles Mingus), Ed Blackwell (Ornette Coleman), Paul Motian (Bill Evans) play the drums rather than rape them. The drummer tonight is in the same mould. He is so subtle, just flies, gunslinger fast, cool as a cucumber. Most of the night just cooking on the top cymbal with one hand laying a stick across the snare beating an incessant driving rhythm. Got a foot on the bass drum that just don't falter. When he takes a roll across the snare he don't miss a beat. He'll take the stuff up a notch to send the shivers down my spine during the final numbers.
The conga guy is something else too. He is sat on a stool. He had his legs around a middle drum which joined to a pair of conga drums. The middle drum had some thin pieces of patterned tin which rattled to the beat to give it a shimmer. What a treasure house of subtle, stop go, push and shove rhythms. The real stuff. And the bass player just cooked all night.
Up front the two girl singers topped it off with chants, snatches of scat singing, vocal aerobics combining half notes to present unique shades to the melting pot of rhythms underneath. They shook gourds, they beat sticks, they sang. Had the audience up on their feet.
I couldn't really present you with a set list tonight but some of my favourites were on the live CD I bought off the stall. Baka, Eeya Be (Elephant Song with Mercier's incredible elepant belly growl beginning), Journey, a song with plenty of mystic clout. My absolute favourite, however, had to be Aziz Aziz. Martin Cradick introduced it thus:
"I met this guy in Morroco and got this tune off him, so I called it after his name, Aziz, in fact I like it so much I called it Aziz Aziz."
Cradick then opened up the tune with one of those snake dancing Casbah rhythms. The conga player tightened his knees around the middle drum, lifted it up, shook it between his knees, dropped it to give the tin rattly bits a shimmer then proceeded to take my head off my shoulders with the funkiest damn beat I've heard this side of the great divide. That's Daffy Duck Radio and the real stuff I mean.
The drummer went wham bam and the whole thing became one glorious Turkish delight of sound. Swung like the clappers. Then to cap it Paddy Le Mercier blew a snake charmer horn like a wailing John Coltrane lick into his microphone. If a belly dancer had cavorted in front of me I wouldn't have turned a hair.
Anything that keeps the burger bars at bay in West Africa, honours a centuries old tradition and gives the Baka people dignity is ok by me. And they sure kicked up a pile of campfire dust while they were at it.
Mike Plumbley