UK · world · afro-celt · folk

Baka Beyond

1 festival played

Thirty years of splicing Celtic tunes onto Cameroonian Baka rhythms — a fusion band that predates the word being fashionable.

Baka Beyond grew out of a trip Martin Cradick and Su Hart made to the rainforest of southeast Cameroon in the early 1990s, where they recorded and played with Baka communities. Cradick had previously worked in the band Outback; back in the UK he began building guitar and fiddle arrangements around the interlocking Baka polyrhythms and water-drumming he had heard, with Hart singing. The result sits somewhere between Breton and Irish dance tunes, Central African vocal music and West African guitar lines, played by a shifting live band of British and African musicians. Royalties from the recordings were channelled back to the Baka through the couple's Global Music Exchange.

worldafro-celtfolk