Marco Werman: Nonesuch Records in New York began as a label for classical music. But from 1967 to 1982, Nonesuch released a groundbreaking series of recordings of music from around the globe. The sounds were stripped down, unplugged, unadorned and traditional. Producers would go into the field, and artists also came into New York studios. The Explorer Series, as it was known, was the first attempt to use portable state-of-the-art recording equipment to document music of specific regions of the globe: Africa, Indonesia and the South Pacific, Tibet and Kashmir, Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia, Central Asia, Europe, and India.

Starting in August of 2002, Nonesuch Records is re-releasing the entire series on 87 CDs. The Explorer Series will continue to be slowly re-released until 2005. Peter Siegel was the series producer.

Peter Siegel: No one had consciously pulled together a body of unadorned traditional world music," he remembers, "and made albums with high quality production values, good engineering, interesting art work, scholarly notes, and attempted to do a comprehensive series. It enabled people to access music in ways that they couldn't previously access it.

Marco Werman: The production is indeed peerless. But the music on many of these recordings will sound so raw as to make it anthropological to a listener expecting an approach to world music that is more fusion and funky. Nevertheless, in 1967, the Explorer series had a great number of fans.

Peter Siegel: There was a wonderful mixture of different groups of people buying them. There were classical music fans who were buying Nonesuch. There were rock kids like the Grateful Dead who were buying the records and learning songs from them like 'I Bid You Goodnight' which came from the 'Real Bahamas' record that I recorded. There were budding classical composers, minimalist composers who were learning the music from them. There were audiences for folk music which was getting to be real big at that time. It really reached across the board.

Marco Werman: A lot of history has passed since these recordings were first produced. On the recording from Zimbabwe of Mbira, or finger piano music, two of the performers died in the struggle for an independent country in the late seventies. But the Explorer Series still feels relevant. It allows the listener to hear the root of a lot of today's so-called World Music.

Peter Siegel: The music at the root of World Music is exquisite, and it helps explain how we got to where we are today, and it has great cultural value that speaks across the generation of time and space.

Marco Werman: Siegel is speaking figuratively as well literally. In 1977, when NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft to probe the limits of the universe, it included on board a record of music. The record is pressed not on vinyl but on copper, and has a longevity of one billion years. The music included on the record has as its source the Nonesuch Explorer series. Can you imagine what the extra-terrestrials will think when they hear the oud of Sudan's great Hamza el Din?

Marco Werman