Song From The Forest - The Story of Louis Sarno

"The forest, the ambience, the little bits of music you hear, the happiness of all the people around me. The excitement because people are going hunting, being with the children I love. Who knows how much longer this life will go on; I feel privileged to have lived a better part of my life in this world."

- Louis Sarno, Song From The Forest

Louis Sarno passed away in April earlier this year, leaving behind him an extraordinary legacy, a historic collection of invaluable musical field recordings and many loved ones. From family and friends in his home in the Central African Republic to those in his birth-home of New Jersey, he seemed to have influenced all who met him along the way.

This post looks at his life immersed in the BayAka Pigmy tribe, deep in the jungle of the Central African Republic: what did Louis and the BayAka people find in each other that led to thirty years together? What were the sounds that drew him there in the first place? What challenges do the BayAka now face, that they didn't when Louis first found them? Both 'The Song From The Forest' documentary, which sees Louis take his son on a journey from their jungle home in the rainforest to the urban jungle of New York City, and 'White Pygmy', a book by Howard Swains have allowed us an insight into much of this- we will talk more about them later.

Louis' life story is one that will energise you if you've ever been lost in a reverie, wondering what would actually happen if you stepped away from the day to day of the odd alternative planet we have built. As his good friend Jim Jarmusch describes at the beginning of 'Song From The Forest', the two of them had long been perplexed by 'the economic system, the political system and the social system. Not feeling comfortable by being told 'this is how the world is''. Louis was a musicologist, a man utterly consumed by and connected with music. His journey to the forest began in the mid 1980's, when he heard a piece of music on the radio that particularly caught his attention. Soon after some research, he found to be a mourning song by the Pygmy people of Yandoumbe, an area in the middle of the Dzanga Ndoki National Park Forest. He made the decision to travel to the Central African Republic in attempt to find the people who were making the sounds, and once found, ended up living there until the end of his life. Louis is described by his friend Jim Jarmusch as 'such a gentle person'. You can truly feel through the stories and films about him that he is free in his mind, an independent thinker who stands a reminder to us all that we don't have to follow the crowd just because the path is laid out for us. Yes, he found his freedom in a tribe thousands of miles from what was home, but for anyone he can simply be a role model for free thinking.

Louis' first trips to the Central African Republic were over two three month periods, but he was to eventually return on a one way ticket, where by this point the BayAka people were excited to welcome their friend back. In the beginning, he slept outside on the ground but as he became accepted among the tribe, they helped him to build a hut, learn their language and had him accompany them on hunting journeys through the jungle for months at a time. Louis fell in love while he was there and married a widowed woman called Ngbali, who he brought up his adopted sons, Samedi and Yambi with. Parenting is generally a shared role in the BayAka community and Louis was no different, caring for and loving other children in the tribe at the same time. In later years his wife found a new partner, as did Louis, a woman whose name is Agati.

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Louis documented the BayAka through both photography and recording their vast expanse of music that is such a prominent part of their day to day lives, and historic culture and tradition. He has recorded around 1400 hours of their music, far more than has ever been documented by anyone else, which is now guarded and cherished at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Over the years he became a teacher in the community and as the nearest was 120 kilometres away, their doctor. He also acted as representative and translator for his people if disputes arose with other tribes as well as militants, who became increasingly invasive as the decades have gone on. He financed new land and other needs for the people, although it wasn't long before he ended up with no disposable income.

It wasn't a care-free life- these responsibilities were huge. But as Louis told the journalist Howard Swains when they spent time together a couple of years back, "I wasn’t searching for a simple life. It’s more simple in terms of paperwork, but it’s much more complicated in terms of human interactions. I was just looking for a life that I would enjoy, and I found it." "Ethnomusicologists & anthropologists develop life long relationships with the communities they're interested in... but nobody goes and lives their permanently." - Dr Noel Lobley, Song From The Forest

The BayAka are hunter-gatherers, who only use a small amount of agriculture and if so it's mostly to trade with other BAyaka people in the next village. They forage mushrooms, fruit, roots, honey from the treetops and hunt monkey, pangolin, duikers (antelope) and other bushmeat. They usually buy in plantain, yams, taro, maize, cucumbers, squash, okra, papaya and mango from neighbouring villages. They are one of roughly eleven different Pygmy groups in Central Africa, whose populations all together total around 60,000. Their homes/areas of rainforest spread across southwestern Central African Republic and the Brazzaville region of the Republic of the Congo, all of which the Kadéï River runs through. Sharing and trading are hugely important within the communities culture- a villager offers Louis to guard his house overnight in return for money, while another simply asks him for it, a situation that occurred especially after his returns from the western world. Favours will be remembered from days ago, and a share of meat will be swapped with a leaf wrap of mushrooms, while childcare will be shared with close members of the social circles. With the lack of medical care and a favour for traditional medicine, Louis estimates that half of children don't make it to 5 (in an interview with The Guardian). Tuberculosis, hepatitis B and malaria are all rife, the latter two of which brought life to an end for Louis eventually.

In recent years, the economy has begun to penetrate their culture, and some do now work for money in coffee plantations... some even for the WWF. But historically and still now, the BayAka have been kept as slaves, by the Bantu people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, known locally as the Bilo. They say that they 'own' some of the BayAka, and beat or even kill them when they don't complete unpaid work. While the BayAka are bound by law to only hunt bushmeat using nets and spears in order to protect the forest, the Bilo have guns and snares, and poach for more than personal consumption, which upsets the balance. It's an all too familiar story that has already played out across much of our planet- over-consumption destroying the wild world. Deforestation is also a major threat, as a result of logging. Both of these issues affect all pygmy groups in Africa. "The Aka or BayAka are one of the world’s most ancient people. The cultural essence of these hunters and gatherers is to be found in their centuries-old polyphonic chants. To navigate the labyrinth of the jungle, the BayAka listen to streams and torrents, to the creaking of the trees, to birdsong, to the wind. The forest has sharpened their hearing. Each sound has an unmistakable meaning. The music of the BayAka is a direct expression of this acoustic way of making sense of the world." - Song From The Forest

Music seems though, just as food, water and air, crucial to the lives of the BayAka. They make music for hunting and make music for playtime, celebrating everything with festivals of song and dance.. it narrates their lives. While BayAka singing had been documented in some form, the instruments had barely been at all. Louis changed this. His recordings were weavings of voice, instrument, forest soundscape, insects and animals all at once. As Jo Barratt talks about in 'Pitt Rivers Collection: The rainforest music of the BayAka', you can hear musicians playing to the pulse of a sheet of insects, playing in time with the forest. (Find here: http://podacademy.org/podcasts/rainforest-music-of-the-bayaka/)

"You can really hear the life bubbling through the recordings- children laughing, conversations... "we must carry on, we must make more music"" - Dr Noel Loblet, Song From The Forest

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Their music is polyphonic, which simply means involving many sounds or voices- the BayAka's songs can involve up to 50 with layers at one time. Spontaneous performances may start with a small group singing a story together or turning food containers into instruments, but end with a frenzy of sound and dance because a 'forest spirit' had emerged from the trees. The topics of songs (from what is described and shown in the film and book) are usually stories of their God, their hunting and living situations as well as plenty of jokes. Water drumming is performed by all, from the young children to the older women while instruments such as the harp-zither, the bow harp and the flute are played by individuals who have almost created their own theme-tunes, as Louis talks about in 'Song from the Forest'. Elder tribe men would once walk around at night playing their one-of-a-kind melodies on their mbyos (four note flutes) and he'd know exactly who it was. This is one of the changes that Louis noticed since he arrived 30 years ago- a decrescendo in these particular sounds as the older members- the 'master musicians'- have died, while the youngsters are less interested. Louis' was given one of the last remaining mbyos, which he treasured until it was stolen by rebels.

"In the fall of 2009, I was traveling in the Congo River Basin and rather accidentally heard about a white man who supposedly had been living with the BayAka pygmies for decades. I went to look for him. A few days later, I stood in a clearing,when Bayaka came running at me from all directions, screaming. Suddenly, the noise ceased, and a tall figure detached itself from the undergrowth: a white man, two heads taller than everybody else, a pygmy baby on both of his arms: Louis Sarno." - Timo Selengia

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The Song From The Forest documentary was born when Sound Designer Timo Selengia teamed up with award winning journalist and author, yet first-time director Micheal Obert. They spent a relatively short amount of preparation time before the film, and together with their production team, headed out to the forest to begin. "Song From The Forest is a film about love – the love of music, of nature, of the world; the love between a father and his son. [It] is also a film about the state of the world and about some of the big issues at the beginning of the 21st century – home, identity, alienation, intercultural-relations, globalization." - Micheal Ober

First we see Louis at home, in more ways than one with his Bayaka friends, family and children, preparing food and eating in his hut, sharing with the children and other villagers, conversing and making everyone laugh, in his roles as doctor and communicator. We watch him during his downtime, listening to the English news on his little radio, or to his vast collection of music such as his European renaissance choir CD, late into the night. In the second half of the film, we follow the journey of Louis' promise two his eldest son Samedi, who at the time of filming is 13 years old. When he was young and very sick one night, Louis promised Samedi that if he made it through to the next day, he would show him some of the world. The documentary follows their journey to New York together. Beautiful, sincere, thoughtful, clever and true and most of all peaceful... much like the descriptions of the man himself. Watch the trailer below:

White Pygmy by Howard Swains "I was lucky to know him." - Howard Swains

White Pygmy, by Howard Swains is a beautifully told, rich and thoughtful story presented in bitesize e-book chapters about Howard's time spent with Louis. It provides a detailed insight to the realities of life- joyful and difficult- for Louis and the BayAka. While Song From The Forest focused on music and Louis and Samedi's trip to America, Howard's book travels deeper into Louis' thoughts, wisdom and opinions. From how he has managed to protect his family from being killed by militant groups of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to what effects (positive and negative) he feels he has had on the people in the last 30 years. Read here: https://medium.com/@howardswains/louis-sarno-1954-2017-86f64b0dbbf1 "I can’t imagine I would have a life as rich as this anywhere else. I’m really lucky. I don’t know how I managed to do it. It was some kind of incompetence and just blind, stumbling luck." - Louis Sarno speaking to Howard Swains

(Photo: Howard Swains of Louis and his family)

All other photographs in this article are stills from Song From The Forest. Watch the film for free as part of your Amazon Prime Membership or rent on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/songfromforest

You can also donate to the BayAka support project here: http://songfromtheforest.com/