by Junko Nozawa
Originally published in the Musings on Music newsletter, June 2025 / No. 11
Chris Berry is careful in adopting any beliefs. He’s seen the dangers they can foment: conflicts and division sown in the name of one’s tribe or religion, for one. It may be an instinct he honed from having lived under the Mugabe regime and in the current political climate. Belief, unlike knowledge, carries doubt. Music, on the other hand, requires no belief: it speaks for itself.
The music spoke to Chris early on. As a preschooler, he spent his recess absorbed in The Jungle Book, tapping along to the invigorating sounds of Dixieland jazz with Legos and sticks. He felt the muse’s deep stirrings when he first came across the improvisational freedom of jazz and a shoplifted copy of Fela Kuti. Years later, a flyer for an African drum and dance class in his small hometown of Sebastopol, California, cemented his path. As he likes to retell it, he walked into that classroom, and never walked out.
“Many people in Africa asked me why I had such a strong reaction to their music—why it moved me so deeply when it didn’t necessarily move others. And I think unless you see things through a spiritual lens, it’s hard to answer that. I don’t claim to have the answer, but I know it was bigger than me. Something resonated.”
The teacher from that fateful class, Titos Sompa, became like a father to him. At 19, Chris followed him to the Congo. A fascination with the mbira, a traditional Zimbabwean “thumb piano,” soon led Chris to Harare, where he spent a decade studying the music of the Shona people under mbira master Monderek Muchena. In the ghettos of Zimbabwe, he formed a band called Panjea, which rapidly gained nationwide attention through a local talent contest.
The young American stood out: a Westerner singing in the local language, skillfully playing the mbira and the ngoma drum, fully embracing the cultural traditions of Zimbabwe. At his home in Kalapana, his African influences were apparent as we ate freshly pounded poi with our fingers, like fufu, rolling it into balls with cooked vegetables and boar.
What began as a musical journey evolved into a deep immersion into the Shona people’s ancient medicines and spirit traditions. During rituals, the mbira is more than a musical instrument; it serves as a tool to communicate with the ancestral realm. Each spirit is associated with a specific song and is summoned for different occasions. Chris would spend days performing ceremonies in rural villages without sleep, then head into town to play at nightclubs: “The line between sacred and profane got really blurry,” he recalls. Even in the clubs, people would slip into trances, seemingly caught between two worlds.
After a decade of offering music in ceremonial settings, Chris became initiated as a spirit medium and ceremony maker. The elders gifted him a mountain to carry out those practices, and passed down the sacred wisdom of the Bana Kuma (“sacred altering”). The mythology of the Bana Kuma offers a map of transformation, a framework for expressing humanity’s power to bring ideas to life.
While Chris achieved popular stardom in southern Africa—Panjea went on to go platinum in Zimbabwe and Mozambique— in the U.S. during the 1980s, African fusion music had little commercial footing. Labels didn’t know how to categorize or promote what Chris was making. Back in the States, life was a hustle: teaching, releasing music, scoring soundtracks, and doing whatever it took to survive as a musician and raise a family. Noise complaints followed his drumming sessions. Some detractors felt he should not be composing African music as a white, American man. His focus began to disperse:
“Focus is essential. Because you have this sacred energy—like Bana Kuma’s energy—and if it gets too scattered in too many directions, it loses its power.”
These days, Chris is focused on creating a cultural shift, where music is used to awaken our greatest potential on Earth, for coexistence, and for healing. He brings together people at drum and dance gatherings he hosts on the bare lava fields of Kalapana, under the full moon, to share in the wisdom of the Bana Kuma.
A central teaching of the Bana Kuma is the paradox of fire in the water, representing the masculine and feminine: the delicate balance that is achieved when the fire doesn’t evaporate the water, and the water doesn’t extinguish the fire. The elders instructed Chris to hold that concept sacred and to go to the land where fire lives in the water.
Fate may be another word for the suspension of belief. In 2008, while on tour, Chris flew to the Hawaiian islands for a series of shows. He looked out the airplane window as Kilauea Volcano was errupting, spilling lava dramatically into the ocean.
He knew he had arrived.
Musings on Music is the brainbaby of Junko Nozawa. ©2025
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