Planet Soup
(Real World)
Just as English has become the world’s universal language and the dollar its standard currency, so too has American popular music become the primary stylistic model, threatening to further melt cultural diversity into a pan-ethnic blob, albeit with a distinctly Yankee accent. From the advent of mass communications, once-insular cultures have been bleeding into one another. But this potentially fruitful journey can’t help but make stops in the U.S., the economic center of the communications biz, in the process picking up some old-fashioned imperialistic infections.
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Living in a country with a hybrid culture, we have no right to condemn the curiosity of foreign musicians dabbling in nonindigenous styles; after all, jazz, country, blues, and rock are all built upon non-American sources. Thankfully a growing number of new releases take a more thoughtful, creatively vital approach, trying their best to avoid outright appropriation. Rather than cashing in on watered-down ethnicity, these musicians are bypassing American models, as a significant chunk of the music on Planet Soup, a three-CD set of so-called “cross-cultural collaborations,” proves. On the other hand, two recent recordings by Canadian guitarist Michael Brook with the Indian classical mandolinist U. Srinivas and legendary Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan demonstrate a careful attempt to assimilate sounds of the Indian subcontinent into an amorphous ambient setting.
Over the years guitarists Ry Cooder and Henry Kaiser have each been involved in a number of interesting, well-conceived projects with foreign musicians. Cooder has delivered striking fusions with Hawaiian guitarist Gabby Pahinui and Indian guitarist V.M. Bhatt. Kaiser, with his frequent sidekick David Lindley, has recorded extensively with musicians from Madagascar. On his own Canadian guitarist Michael Brook creates fairly snoozy ambient music that veers dangerously close to New Age, but he’s increasingly been involved with producing pan-ethnic fusion records. His conceptual ambitions resemble those of Cooder and Kaiser. But whereas Cooder and Kaiser meticulously arrange their projects to retain the essential styles of the musicians they collaborate with, Brook has had the troubling urge to situate his subjects within musical settings that have no real identity. Two of his recent projects have achieved disparate results.
While most of these cross-cultural collaborations have produced uneven recordings, definite improvements can be heard. For all of Brook’s missteps, both records have their moments, though the pop model still reigns. Unmentioned, of course, is that these musicians wouldn’t mind reaping the rewards of success in the American marketplace. But despite our immigrant roots, most Americans have no interest in ethnic music, unless it’s the music of our own ethnic group; yet the drive to assimilate destroys even these tendencies quickly. Aside from flashes here and there–Ofra Haza and King Sunny Ade, for example–nobody from outside Europe and America has really struck gold in the U.S. Some musicians will never relent, however, finding something more valuable in the process than the lure of commerce. Ali Khan may sing with Eddie Vedder and revel in the praise of Jeff Buckley, but he still delivers the goods.
