The Spirit Cries: Music Of The Rain Forests Of South America & The Caribbean
For this first title in the Endangered Music Project, a subseries of THE WORLD, Mickey Hart explored the vast repositories of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, sorting through hundreds of hours of tapes representing rainforest cultures of the New World.  Among these people, the natural environment remains inseparably linked to belief systems and spiritual values that have guided their tribes for generations.  Now, with the decimation of tropical rainforest environments, these indigenous cultures are also being eroded, their traditions diluted or invalidated altogether -- and the spirit of a people can thus be lost, to the world at large and to its own young people and future generations.The mission of The Endangered Music Project is the resurrection of archival tapes documenting such traditions from the silence of the Library shelves, remastering and sonically cleansing them to a listenable state for modern ears, and for posterity.This album represents seven tribal cultures from seven different countries:  the Garifune of Belize; the Choco Indians of Panama and Colombia; the Shipibo and the Ashaninka, both of Peru; the Aluku of French Guiana; the Wayana of Suriname, and the Maroons of Jamaica.  Representing the best performances and most salvageable recordings of the enormous archival resources, these represent five decades of field recording by dedicated ethnomusicologists and anthropologists who had the foresight to capture these vanishing cultures.   Proceeds from the sales of this recording benefit the performers and their descendants in trust, and make possible future recordings in the Endangered Music Project.