Global Music With a Single Heart

Quick, what do English rock star Peter Gabriel, L.A. club favorites the Bonedaddys, West African vocalist Salif Keita, Israeli pop star Ofra Haza and the Caribbean zouk band Kassav have in common?

All are involved to varying degrees in “world beat,” a loosely aligned and hazily defined movement encompassing pop styles from around the globe. And a growing segment of the pop audience is embracing world beat as a fresh alternative.

“There’s not a lot of exciting things happening in Western pop now, so there’s a hunger for something new that has energy but is not going to bludgeon people,” observes Randall Grass, director of publicity and promotion for New Jersey-based Shanachie Records, which has focused on world beat music for the past decade. “They want musical substance, but not something completely laid-back.”

Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album was the short-term trigger for the world beat surge, but other prominent rock performers--such as Gabriel, Sting and Talking Heads-- have incorporated non-Western pop elements into their music.

The hip-hop posse is getting in on the action--both M/A/R/R/S’ smash “Pump Up the Volume” and a remixed version of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full” feature the “sampled” voice of Ofra Haza.

The recently released sound-track album to the upcoming film “Sweet Lies” features one track by Salif Keita and another by Kassav’s Jacob Desvarieux and Georges Decimus. And Ladysmith Black Mambazo provided the music for a 7-Up TV commercial earlier this year.

The momentum is powerful enough to convince WOMAD (World of Music and Dance), the British organization that has been presenting festivals in England since 1982, to test the North American appetite for world beat with a six-day festival starting Tuesday at the Harbourfront Arts Complex in Toronto. Among the 40 artists scheduled to appear there are the Bhundu Boys from Zimbabwe, Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and norten o accordion star Flaco Jiminez.

Some world beat styles, like South African music, are pure, regional pop styles that evolved from local traditions. Others are more in a classic melting-pot vein, with the musicians adding elements of Anglo-American pop (particularly black dance music) to local sounds. Or vice versa.

“In a way, the world beat thing now is a real American form of music,” says Michael Tempo of L.A.’s Bonedaddys, who released their “A-Koo-De-A “ album earlier this year on the local Chameleon label. “It’s a natural reflection of switching the channel and hearing rap music, then reggae, then classical and country. Things are blending.

“I tell people I play music indigenous to the natives of western Kentucky,” he quipped. “I could find African records when I grew up in Paducah. That was as much a part of my culture as the country music coming over the radio and through the kitchen window.”

World beat music is becoming more readily available in record stores. Virgin has released several albums through a distribution deal with the Earthworks label, and Celluloid inaugurated its Braziloid label featuring contemporary Brazilian artists this year.

Shanachie’s “World Beat/Ethno Pop” series features albums from the German/Arabic group Dissidenten, Haza, sitar player Ashwin Batish and South African artist Obed Ngobeni. Grass hopes the new logo his label developed will provide the kind of identity for world beat that Windham Hill did for New Age music, and overcome some marketing problems in stores.

“The first Dissidenten record we released is often stocked in the Middle Eastern section of the international section of stores,” he explained. “International sections are regarded by stores as graveyards and the record was being mixed in with traditional music. People won’t know where to find the records or distinguish between ethnic traditional music and the world beat pop music we’re releasing.”

World Beat is not a particular “sound” so much as an umbrella term for pop music that is usually rhythm-oriented and rooted in regional or ethnic musical traditions. It encompasses the myriad of African pop styles, Caribbean hybrids like reggae, soca and the currently hot zouk sound, music from the Balkans and Middle East, and even home-grown styles like zydeco.

The best way to get an overview is by listening to the specialty radio programs usually found on public or college stations. But, in a very real sense, the links connecting world beat are in the ears of the beholder.

For KCRW-FM’s Jimi Hori, “soul” is the unifying element, and on his “Land of a Thousand Dances” program he’ll mix chart hits like Levert’s “Casanova” or a country classic by Tammy Wynette with more typical world beat sounds. KPFK-FM’s Don Mizell adds jazz-fusion artists and big name rock performers because they fit the “progressive, ethno-rhythmic beat music” slant of his “Fusion and Beyond” show.

And world beat may just be the current label for an older phenomenon. Early Santana’s blend of blues/rock with Afro-Cuban percussion and the “raga-rock” rage inspired by Ravi Shankar in the late ‘60s might be labeled world beat today. John Coltrane aroused interest in non-Western music among jazz musicians in the mid-’60s and contemporary composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich have woven ethnic elements into their pieces.

But one key element in the current surge was reggae’s rise to international prominence. That exposed many rock listeners to a viable foreign style that was distinct from American and British pop music.

“Those people who might have started with reggae are discovering it’s not dangerous to explore other styles,” said John Storm Roberts of Original Music, a mail-order company based in upstate New York which specializes in world music.

“My current thing is Cambodian rock ‘n’ roll. If we put something like that in the catalogue, people are more prepared now to have a pop at it rather than regard it like kids poking at spinach to make sure it doesn’t move or squeak.”

The world beat network may still be taking shape here, but it’s already an organized movement in England. The Globestyle label has released more than two dozen albums of the pop music found in countries ranging from Madagascar to Martinique.

WOMAD started when Peter Gabriel approached some journalists and fans in Bristol about organizing a concert featuring Gabriel and an African artist. The project mushroomed into a full-scale 1982 festival featuring performers from Pakistan, China and Africa alongside Gabriel, Echo & the Bunnymen and the English Beat.

“Until then, ethnic music had been in the hands of purists and musicologists who looked upon it as something in aspic to be preserved,” says Gabriel. “They didn’t see it as the vital, living culture we believed it was.

“When you talk to the musicians, the younger guys are rock fans, and music, like any art, steals mercilessly from anything that interests it or it bumps across.”

Gabriel got more of a cross-cultural bump than he bargained for when the Drummers of Burundi dropped by his home to do some TV promotion before the first festival.

Remembered Gabriel, “I thought just a couple of the Burundis would come, but they all turned up in their outfits, set up on the lawn in front of this very English house and started pounding their drums through this quiet English valley. All the school kids were coming up, very curious.”

The first festival was a financial disaster, but a reunion benefit concert in London by Gabriel and his old band Genesis kept the organization operating. Gabriel has phased out his active involvement, but WOMAD no longer needs pop headliners (Siouxsie & the Banshees, New Order and Aswad have all appeared) to attract an audience to its annual events.

Thomas Brooman, the artistic director for WOMAD, characterized the world music scene in England as very healthy. “For once, it’s not a media-inspired bubble which says Sunny Ade or Youssou N’Dour are the tastes of the moment. It’s across a spectrum of artists and it’s coming from a grass-root enthusiasm.

“There’s a lot of sympathy and cooperation between all the labels. We’re all hoping to stimulate people’s support without blowing the bubble up too big too soon. We don’t want to make a fad of this because British pop music history is littered with them.”

Is world beat a next big thing? Probably not--and that doesn’t really bother its adherents. Even those involved with record labels that stand to benefit if world beat does take off commercially share Brooman’s fear of the “fad” factor.

World beat’s principal source of exposure is likely to remain the specialty shows featured on public or college radio. There has been sporadic success getting records played at dance clubs, but acceptance by commercial rock and black radio in the near future seems unlikely.

“The biggest problem to breaking into the mainstream is going to be language,” says KPFK’s Don Mizell. “English is the dominant language in the world and we’re very Anglocentric.

“With a lot of the South African music and zouk , too, the beat is happening for America--more so than with reggae music--but these guys are singing in French and South African dialects.”

Mizell is one world beat enthusiast with plenty of experience in the commercial industry. He headed jazz and fusion divisions at A&M; and Elektra in the ‘70s and was the program director during the once-adventurous black-music station KJLH’s pioneering days in the early ‘80s. He now works as an entertainment lawyer in Century City but remains “on a mission for this music.”

Said Mizell, “I’m doing this out of love and it’s like they say: You know you’re on the right track when you don’t feel you have any choice. I have to get to this music and get it to where people say, ‘Wow! I didn’t know I would like that but, you know, I like that. Who was that? Where can I get that?’ ”