Chris Berry & Panjea

Subterranean; Mon. May 8
HotHouse; Tue. May 9

Picture It: A white American kid travels to Africa, immerses himself in Zimbabwean culture, earns the respect of elders, forms a successful band and then returns home to show his native country what he's learned. Sounds like some NPR lover's daydream, right? With anyone other than Chris Berry it might be, but this small town California kid's ingenious musical instincts are far from commonplace.

It's not unheard of for white pop stars to find success in southern Africa---Johnny Clegg boldly mixed Zulu harmony and folk-rock in the 80s, as did Paul Simon with his Graceland project---but Berry faces a more difficult situation. Developing World debt, AIDS and corruption are trickier issues to rally around than the cut & dry ethics of apartheid. Perhaps emboldened by his maverick status, he uses the proverb-heavy vernacular of African pop icons like Thomas Mapfumo to swing at big targets. On his latest, Dancemakers (Wrasse), those include September 11 ("We build the fortress walls higher/ But if it doesn't put out the fire/These flames only grow higher...") and, at least figuratively, American imperialism ("Axe forgets what the fallen tree cannot").

But it's Berry's band Panjea, which tonight features the String Cheese Incident cross-genre violinist Micheal Kang, that gets Berry to the podium in the first place. The group's tightly wound, brass-heavy arrangements invoke the ghost of Afrobeat legend Feli Kuti, albeit dressed in baggy hip-hop jeans.  Who says liberal politics can't have real-world consequences?

---by Matthew Lurie