The biography of Californian Chris Berry reads almost like an adventure novel. Berry grew up in Sebastopol, a small town just north of San Francisco, where at a young age he started hanging out with a group of youths getting their kicks from shoplifting. During one of their "forays" a music cassette containing music by Fela Kuti was part of the loot. Berry was immediately captivated by the sounds he heard on this tape and as if god himself was involved, not much later he ran into Congolese master drummer and percussionist Titos Sompa. Sompa started to teach Chris the secrets of the djembe and these training sessions eventually resulted in a trip to Africa. Berry's stay on the black continent would last almost a decade, most of which he spent in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, where he started studying the culture and music of the Shona people. Among other things Berry became fluent in Shona speaking and was initiated into the secrets of the mbira. It was also while living in Zimbabwe that Chris founded his first band. Panjea played a mix of funk, hip-hop and Afro-pop and quickly became hugely popular in South-Africa. But then fate struck a cruel blow: when in a short time Panjea loses no less than four members to aids and Berry becomes ever more scrutinized by the repressive Mugabe regime, the band's fate is sealed. Nowadays Berry is living and working in the United States again, but his love for the mbira remained. In collaboration with the Kanaga System Krush label that resulted in 'King Of Me', sounding like a cross between an American singer-songwriter album and an authentic Zimbabwean mbira-production (think Chiwoniso). On 'King Of Me' Berry doesn't play just any ordinary mbira, but a double electronic pimped out version. Even though the songs sung in English didn't disappoint, yours truly was drawn more towards the more authentic sounding tracks in Shona.