Native music in out-of-the-way parts of the world is fast disappearing. Thousands of songs and drum rhythms handed down through generations of woolly-headed blacks, Oriental priests and court musicians (even by U. S. Indians, hillbillies and Negroes in the South and West) are already extinct. Causes of this high mortality rate: the phonograph and the radio. Primitive races find old-fashioned radio sets somewhat fragile for jungle use. But cheap, hand-cranked squeak-boxes with chipped records of American cowboy songs and Italian operas are found today in mud-walled villages from Timbuktu to Singapore. Impressed by this mechanical magic, natives imitate the scratchy voices, learn to sing Il Trovatore, and end by preferring it, for better or worse, to their own ancient chants.
Fighting a losing battle against time, and using the same weapon as the phonograph salesmen, anthropologists and folk-locists the world over are doing what they can to salvage the remnants of primitive music. Patient, ill-paid scholars sweat through the tropics holding microphones, and even old-fashioned dictaphones, to the mouths of aging tribesmen, hoping to catch and preserve melodies that are on the point of death. Collections of their records are kept in museums. Now & then a few are put on sale.
Two years ago, under the auspices of the Belgian Government, a tall, rawboned cinema director, Armand Denis (Goona-Goona), and his wife, Leila Roosevelt, undertook a $150,000 expedition to the Belgian Congo. Purposes: to make a motion picture survey of certain parts of the country for Belgian Congo's National Park Institute; to take sound film material suitable for use in an African movie. Explorer Denis, his wife, cameramen, and Pooka, a cat (which survived sand storms and a fight with a leopard, only to be run over later on a quiet New England country road) pushed their way through jungles and over mountains never before seen by the cinecamera's eye. The film has not yet been released, but some of the most exciting portions of the sound track have been re-recorded on discs, last week were put on sale.* Endorsed by Anthropologist George Herzog of Columbia University, these discs constitute the best authentic anthology of African Negro music to be found on commercial phonograph records. Much of this music shows rhythmic resemblances to jazz, includes drums, flutes, xylophones and chanting by long-headed Congo Negroes, by the Mambuti Pygmies, and by the Watusi. a race of 7-ft. African giants living as feudal chiefs in what was formerly German Tanganyika. The Pygmies sing repetitious melodies in the manner of change-ringers, each one hooting his single note in turn. The Babira Negroes of the Ituri Forest punctuate the high-pitched gargling of their soloist with aggressive whoops. The Watusi Drummers hammer an intense counterpoint of rhythms more complicated than Gene Krupa's randiest rataplan.