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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you want to hear an strong mix of African and European sounds in a thematically coherent score. Avoid it... if the thought of native African chants and songs sprinkled throughout a score album deters you. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Nowhere in Africa: (Niki Reiser) Winning the 2002 Academy Award for "Best Foreign Language Film," Nowhere in Africa is a true love story that depicts the 20-year tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi's in 1938 and takes refuge on a farm in Kenya. The film's beauty blossoms out of the relationships that the parents and their daughter establish with the people and land of Kenya during their long stay. Directed by Caroline Link, the acclaimed German film continues her collaboration with composer Niki Reiser, with whom she has worked on multiple, popular arthouse projects in the past two decades. American film music fans will likely be unfamiliar with Reiser, a Swiss composer and flute performer whose formal musical education includes study with several contemporary stars of the field. His dozen or so film scores of note are accompanied by his flute recordings with other well known European artists. The score for Nowhere in Africa would require a merging of two distinctly different world sounds; the classical, orchestral lyricism of a European orchestra, and the ethnic vocal chants and songs of the local Kenyans. Such scores aren't a new concept, and Reiser produces an enormously effective combination of Western and African styles into a score that is both serviceable and listenable. Most importantly, the score never becomes awash in its own melodramatic weight (such as Gabriel Yared's The English Patient), nor does it lose its base in simple authenticity (which plagues much of Hans Zimmer's African music, including the concurrent Tears of the Sun). Instead, Reiser pays close attention to the actual rituals and sounds in native Kenyan songs and integrates them into his orchestral material very well. The base of Reiser's work for Nowhere in Africa is dramatic and orchestral, with the haunting memories of the European lifestyle always present in the score. Several orchestral-only cues, performed by the Baset Symphony Orchestra, offer a sound that matches the best of Jan A.P. Kaczmarek or Gabriel Yared, with the two "Nowhere in Africa" suites holding a significant portion of the album's power. Often dominated by deep strings, Reiser's composition for the orchestra is superb, but the true interest of Nowhere in Africa is his incorporation of native ethnic singing and percussion into the mix. There are a handful of cues that feature a Kenyan language and its chants alone, without instrumental accompaniment, and these cues may be difficult for Western ears to digest (especially after the longer sections with the lush orchestra). The highlighting beauty of the score, however, comes from those cues in which Reiser combines the two sounds, with the "Africa - Europe" and "Closing Frame" offering stunning aural diversity. Assisting this process is a remarkable sound quality, with a vibrant and dynamic orchestral recording mixed with intimate voices when few in numbers, but expanding for massive resonance when the orchestra is mixed with a full African choir. The mix of highly active, native drums into otherwise sterile orchestral cues (on occasion) is a treat for the listener as well. The album is the second score release by the Higher Octave Music label, which is branching out into the soundtrack genre with a flourish. The cues are presented out of order, though they stand well as presented, and two cues by Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock ("Poland Means Death" and "Grasshoppers") are included. Overall, Nowhere in Africa is a superior effort to combine Western and African elements into a package that is both interesting and pleasant to regular listeners of orchestral scores, even though the album contains sounds that may, at times, be too foreign for their enjoyment. ****
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