Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #861
Written 4/24/03, Revised 3/4/09
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Buy it... if you seek to hear a rare, strong mix of African and European
sounds in a harmonically and thematically coherent score.
Avoid it... if the thought of native African chants and source-like songs
sprinkled throughout an otherwise somewhat mellow orchestral score album deters
you.
Nowhere in Africa: (Niki Reiser) Making waves by 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 continued her collaboration with composer Niki Reiser, with whom she
had collaborated with to produce multiple, popular arthouse projects over the
previous 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 by 2003 were accompanied by his flute recordings with several 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 authentic employment of the ethnic vocal
chants and songs of the local Kenyan culture. Such scores aren't a new concept, and
Reiser produces an enormously effective combination of Western and African styles
in a work that is both serviceable for the context and listenable on its own. Most
importantly, the often dynamic score never becomes awash in its own melodramatic
weight (such as Gabriel Yared's The English Patient), nor does it lose its
base in terms of simple authenticity (a circumstance which plagues much of Hans
Zimmer's African-related music, including the concurrent Tears of the Sun).
Parts of the ethnic material will remind of James Horner's Bopha!, though
packaged in a far more palatable format. Rather than uniformly following any of
these paths of prior exploration, Reiser pays close attention to the actual rituals
and sounds in native Kenyan songs and integrates them into his orchestral material
very well. As expected, the Kenyen elements do alone carry the torch in some of the
cues, serving as source-like material for several scenes in the film.
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. He avoids addressing any of the stereotypical musical representations
of Jewish culture, even in the scenes of remembrance involving the characters'
prior lifestyle. Several orchestra-only cues, performed by the Baset Symphony
Orchestra, offer a sound that matches the best related recordings 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 range of 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 indeed 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). But the highlighting beauty of the score, however, comes
from those cues in which Reiser combines the two sounds, with "Africa - Europe"
and "Closing Frame" offering stunning aural diversity and "Journey Through Kenya"
a lengthy exploration of the score's most powerful merging of its halves. Assisting
this process is a remarkable quality and mix of recording, with a vibrant and
dynamic orchestral sound layered with intimate voices when few in numbers, but
expanding for massive resonance when the orchestra is mixed with a full African
choir. The insertion 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 was branching out into
the soundtrack genre with a flourish at the time. The cues from this score are
presented out of chronological order, though they stand well as presented, and two
contributions 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 veteran collectors of orchestral film music. The experience contains sounds that
may, at times, be too foreign for enjoyment, but you can't help but appreciate the
work nonetheless.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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