root salad Real World Gold
Sometimes you’ve just got to flaunt your wealth. Elizabeth Kinder hears how Real World are doing it.
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elebrating their 23rd birthday (and why not), Real World Records have come up with the excellent idea of re-issuing iconic
albums from their extensive back catalogue. Aptly titled Real World Gold, the first ten in the series were released this May. It’s been a wonderful experience listening to music that I’d sort of forgotten about, and hearing fabulous recordings for the first time, having somehow missed them before.
Geoffrey Oryema’s album Exile was a revelation, his gorgeous voice lifted by the sweet and subtle arrangements, the music springing from his Ugandan roots. Then of course there’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Mustt Mustt. I’d forgotten that I’d discovered him courtesy of Real World, which in a moment of inspiration put him together with Massive Attack, even before their seminal Blue Lines release, and placed qawwali music in the sound- track of a new generation.
It’s difficult to overestimate the impor- tance of the Real World imprint in open- ing our ears and minds to the music of other cultures, from those we might easily recognise, like the gospel of The Blind Boys Of Alabama to the once unfamiliar sounds of say soukous, (courtesy of Papa Wemba), the poly-rhythms of the Drum- mers Of Burundi or the subtlety of Bud- dhist chants from Lama Gyurme.
The music is not without controversy.
Real World did not shy away from the thorny issue of accessibility and to intro- duce this ‘foreign’ music the label embraced Western production methods and fostered cross cultural musical collabo- rations which mixed the strange with the familiar. Discussing this with the label’s A&R supremo Amanda Jones, she shies away from the term ‘fusion’ which she says, “just implies a mess” preferring to use the term ‘collaboration’. She says that the musicians concerned were keen to col- laborate, though she acknowledges that issues of authenticity arise from this.
But these are not field recordings. You could argue that the minute you get tradi- tional musicians into a studio, authenticity leaves the building. And as label founder Peter Gabriel pointed out to Mark Coles in his The Shed radio programme, the guid- ing spirit behind the releases is not to pre- serve music in an historical context but to try and get it heard, across borders and cul- tural boundaries. He believes that musi- cians should be free to take their music down whatever route they wish, to be able to work with their tradition in a way that is meaningful to them. “Like,” he says, “a dog in the park, which sniffs something
interesting and jumps on it. Musicians shouldn’t have to worry about the prove- nance of their partners.”
Jones points out that the studios at
Real World have been designed to make musicians who may otherwise feel daunted in a new country and recording for the first time to feel as comfortable as possible. The design resulted in probably the biggest control room in the world at the request of Peter Gabriel, who knows how confidence- sapping it can be to have to sing in a small room behind glass, whilst those at the desk seem to be rolling around having a laugh.
At Real World, everyone’s in the con- trol room working together, the producer the engineer, the band. It’s a space designed to foster an inclusive atmo- sphere. They are at pains too, says Jones, to make sure that food from the artist’s country is available, because as her boss says, “An army marches on its stomach.”
If you didn’t know that a musician was the guiding light behind Real World then it wouldn’t be hard to fathom from its out- put. Where the aims of the artist and the needs of the record company meet is an explosive area, and production issues can be extremely fraught. But I’d argue that Gabriel’s career as a musician gives his label the edge when attracting artists to sign or suggesting various collaborations between artists and producers.
After all, Geoffrey Oryema’s work with Eno and Peter Gabriel on Exile creat- ed a remarkable debut; Papa Wemba’s driving soukous reached a wider audience with Stephen Hague’s pop sensibility employed on Emotion. And of course
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan W
there are the featured artists collabora- tions, from the world-renowned Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Massive Attack combo to the less well known – at least in this country –Lama Gyurme from Bhutan with the French pianist Jean-Philippe Rykiel.
hat Real World has done in making music from all over the world accessible to our ears is to spark interest, not just in the
minds of Western artists who, wanting to discover the source of music they’ve heard, will travel the world to work with different artists. It’s also inspired local musicians across the planet to turn to their own traditions and work with them. So music which might have been lost or become ossified is made relevant again to a new generation. And perhaps, by returning to their own roots with these releases, Real World will also appeal to a new generation and find the means of continuing into the future.
With the internet and widely democra- tised recording techniques, there’s so much accessibility to music from anywhere that it’s easy to forget that when Real World started out this wasn’t the case. The record- ings released by the label provided us with a sound bed that stimulated our interest in music from different cultures the world over. They enticed and guided us onto a journey of exploration of the ‘other’ which we can now, in this digital age, so easily undertake. In making the unfamiliar famil- iar, Real World releases broke through cul- tural boundaries, allowing us all to see that in our diversity there should be noth- ing to divide us.
www.realworldrecords.com F 19 f
Photo: Dave Peabody
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