Geoffrey Oryema

Geoffrey Oryema faced a far graver initiation than most musicians who simply serve their apprenticeships, since his departure from his homeland required concealment in a car trunk to escape execution. Uganda was the country of his birth, and his father, a civil servant who advanced from police chief to cabinet minister, passed on the region’s folk repertoire along with mastery of the nanga harp while school lessons supplied training in Western music. Under Idi Amin’s regime the situation grew lethal, and in 1977 the elder Oryema was killed by the armed forces along with countless others, leaving his son convinced that flight offered the sole chance of survival. Friends arranged his covert crossing into Kenya, after which he wandered without relatives or allies until he reached Paris.

In the early 1980s that city functioned as a magnet for African musicians, yet the prevailing sound was dance-oriented and studio-treated with synthesizers and drum machines, an approach remote from the inward character of Oryema’s writing. He persisted nonetheless, absorbing rock and roll alongside other currents until he had shaped a gleaming yet firmly rooted African pop that drew the notice of Real World. Brian Eno produced the resulting album Exile, a mixed achievement whose strongest passages belonged to Oryema while other stretches remained excessively atmospheric. The association opened doors to the international WOMAD festival circuit, and in 1993 he released Beat the Border, whose abundant melodies and open-voiced singing fused into a richly textured whole. Four years later Night to Night appeared, more Western in cast yet still uniting African, European, and American strands without thinning any of them, thanks in part to producer Daniel Lanois. Now settled in the French province of Normandy, he continued to work quietly, issuing Spirit in 2000.