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Star Ledger, Feature >>
Africa has received more than its share of missionaries, but now it is sending one to America -- and, oddly enough, he's American.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, the teenaged Chris Berry didn't seem like someone who would one day be told by a tribal elder in the Zimbabwe bush to be a bridgemaker between America and Africa. But Berry, who became both an accomplished traditional player and an African rock star, found himself pointed back toward the country he had left behind.
The flowering of this musical and spiritual growth began with the unlikely fertilizer of petty theft in a California mall. Berry and his friends shoplifted a cassette tape of Nigeria's Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo Kuti, eventually finding himself transfixed with the music.
"Fela made me realize that African music could make you move and dance like nothing else," said the now 34-year-old Berry, a singer-songwriter who's also considered a master of the mbira (thumb piano) and the Congolese ngoma drum.
Berry began to study African music and eventually traveled to the Congo and then Mozambique, where he lived among the homeless, playing on the streets with the first incarnation of his band, Panjea (named for the prehistoric land mass from which the current continents separated).
"I was living in a cardboard box and watching people die around me," he said of his time in Mozambique. "I remember thinking how lucky the homeless people were in America, that they had the option of actually taking food from garbage cans."
After figuring out how to electrify the sound of the mbira, he and his band began getting larger audiences. Their big break came when they won an African version of "Star Search," becoming known throughout southern African and releasing seven popular albums.
Berry also played traditional music in his adopted home north of Harare, Zimbabwe. During one ecstatic ceremony, when dancers were being possessed by spirits, Berry said, one elder told him to become a "bridge maker" between Africa and his homeland, "to build that bridge with music."
So Berry returned to America, with the hopes of introducing African music and culture. Now Brooklyn based, Berry recorded "Dancemakers," his first U.S. release, which comes out on Wrasse Records on Tuesday. (On Saturday he'll perform solo at Maplewood's Burgdorff Cultural Center.) The album is a collection of bright, accessible pop, with varying degrees of African flavor. The songs all have affirmative lyrics: One says, "I found love on the mountain and I'm trying to bring it down to these streets."
Berry notes that his live shows are a mix of short-format tunes and longer tunes that may be reminiscent of trance ceremonies if you are African, or jam bands if you are American.
Ironically, Berry also feels it is his life mission to reintroduce young Africans to their own traditional music.
"So many kids in Africa want to be like Kanye (West) or Jay Z, but what they don't realize is that all of those hip-hop rhythms were originally created from African music," he said. "I am trying to make it cool for the kids to learn the traditional instruments from the elders."
Berry also formed the Panjea Foundation, which organizes trips to Africa so that Westerners can learn about traditional music and culture.
"In Africa," Berry said, "music just exists in everything. ... It's not about the end result, it's more of the journey. People live it, rather than listen to it." 04/13/06 >> go there
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