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Grilling Gillett
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Emusic.com, Grilling Gillett >>
by Richard Gehr
Has a musical genre ever been stuck with a more ethnocentric and just plain silly name than "world music"? If folk music is music performed and passed along by folks, world music is made, well, somewhere in the world, but nearly always outside the Western world — unless you're talking about Louisiana Cajun or Native American sounds, in which case you're right back where you started. It doesn't even work on a poetic level — world music is just about the only name for a musical genre that doesn't somehow sound like music, e.g., jazz, rock, reggae or blues.
Here's how that problematic name came about: in 1987, BBC DJ Charlie Gillett and a group of indie-label types that included Folk Roots (now fRoots) magazine editor Ian Anderson and producer Joe Boyd met at a London pub in order to figure out what to call the impressive new influx of records from Africa, Bulgaria and elsewhere that was beginning to pique record buyers' interest (thank you, Paul Simon and David Byrne) but seemed to defy easy categorization. The term they came up with was "world music," and no one has been particularly happy with it since — including Gillett himself, who discovers and disseminates the most truly diverse sounds around, week after week, on both his Radio London and BBC World Service shows (visit charliegillett.com for playlists and color commentary). I caught up with Gillett in London recently, prior to his Saturday night show on Radio London.
So how does it feel to have invented world music? "None of us would dream of claiming that!" he gasped. "We were looking for a name to give something everyone in the room was well aware had existed for a long time. But a lot of records needed a box to be put into, and the question that came up was, 'Can you put a Bulgarian choir into the same box as King Sunny Ade?' The company that had the Bhundu Boys at the time was furious because they were going to be taken out of the rock box they'd managed to get themselves into — they were being played by [late BBC DJ] John Peel — and relegated to this junior category, which was never the intention."
So how has it worked out? "Personally, I've always hoped people would just come through this door and move into the big, wide world," said Gillett. "Which does happen."
The night I dropped by, Gillett's guest turned out to be Mory Kanté. The Guinean star discussed his wonderful new acoustic album, Sabou, performed mesmerizing traditional griot music on kora and acoustic guitar and engaged in a favorite Gillett segment, "Record Ping-Pong," concluding his selection of various Guinean favorites with a final surprising choice: Barry White's "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Baby." It turns out Kanté had covered White's tunes in an Abidjan, Ivory Coast, nightclub in the late '70s, using traditional West African instrumentation, a performance the late, venerable love machine had much enjoyed while in town for a golf tournament.
In an earlier life, Gillett authored the still-in-print The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (Da Capo, 1972), arguably the first serious book on the subject. His playlist reflected his early passion, with dips into works by Ray Charles and Mavis Staples, which he felt prefigured Kanté's music. Kanté seconded those connections, and added that he specifically made the female backing vocals on his new album resemble a Charles-like horn section.
Thanks to the Internet, of course, more music is available to more people than ever before. Yet Gillett thinks the net could be even more helpful. "I'm still bewildered by how difficult it is, for example, to buy a record on a major label in Italy. The major-label affiliates in the UK and USA are almost always uninterested in putting it out, but at the same time they want to protect their potential licensees, so they don't encourage global access to their international catalogs."
As partial compensation, Gillett has been releasing annual anthologies of world music. Recent collections have included Algerian rai star Khaled, Congolese fashion plate Kanda Bongo Man, Mexican chanteuse Lila Downs and Israeli folk singer Chava Alberstein. His current enthusiasms include Italian singer Pietra Montecorvino ("like Edith Piaf, with a sandpaper voice and Tunisian female backing vocalists"), Tinawaren from Mali's nomadic Tuareg tribe and Mexican-Quebecoise vocalist Lhasa. Charlie Gillett may not have invented world music, but he makes it sound like a better idea with each broadcast. 11/28/04 >> go there
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