Mayam (sung by Gedisa Jacob)

Описание: Gedisa Jacob singing "Mayam" at BBQ/jam session at Patrick Savage's house, Jan 12, 2025.
Video by Jigar Ganatra.

Context:
"a musical gathering...caught on film by Tanzanian film-maker Jigar Ganatra at a party at my house last year. Several hundred music scholars and practitioners were visiting my hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, for a conference. I hosted a barbecue to welcome them, and naturally after some food and drink, we started singing and playing music from our home countries — which included the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, China, Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Papua New Guinea.

My favourite moment was when a colleague who was attending this conference for the first time, Gedisa Jacob, who researches music at the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in Port Moresby, started to sing a song from his home in Morobe province. At first, the rest of us just listened. But as he moved into the chorus, which used non-linguistic ‘vocables’ such as ‘oh yah oh’ (similar to ‘tra la la’ in English songs), I felt like I was starting to understand the rhythmic and melodic structure, which used the same five-note (pentatonic) scale and four-beat metre found in many songs worldwide.

I started to join in, harmonizing with his melody on the piano. One of the other guests, Cara Brasted, started to improvise her own complementary melody on the violin. My dad, Mike Savage, started strumming chords on his guitar and my student, Marin Naruse, joined in on her sanshin (an instrument originating from her home, the Amami Islands in Japan). Gradually more of us joined in, singing and playing together: “Oh yah ooooh oh yah oh”.

None of us, other than Jacob, had any idea what the song was about. Afterwards, he explained it concerns the mayam tree, the leaves of which his people use to make traditional medicines.

But it didn’t really matter. Singing and playing these near-universal scales and rhythms collectively had bonded us together in ways that couldn’t be expressed in words. That is the power of music. Music is not a universal language — but it can bring us together when words fail."

(Source: Savage, P. E. (2026). Music is not a universal language—But it can bring us together when words fail. Nature, 650, 819–822. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00... [Un-paywalled PDF: https://rdcu.be/e5gLE])