review

Jesus Christ, Peter Gabriel

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Peter Gabriel Passion New Age Grammy

The New Age Grammy enters the 90s. Peter Gabriel is a worthy winner. But a new age hyperstar is waiting in the wings…

Peter Gabriel’s Passion is a landmark album. It was the first album ever released on his Real World label. That means it was the first CD to have that lovely earthy rainbow spine. It was the moment WOMAD became an institution, rather than a financial disaster that could only be rescued by the power of prog. And it was very likely the first time many in the west were exposed to the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N’Dour, and Baaba Maal.

It also marked the first time the Grammy Award for Best New Age Recording was won by a superstar – and I don’t mean Jesus Christ.

Peter Gabriel isn’t cool now, and he wasn’t cool then. He was and is the exact opposite of cool, and that’s what makes him so wonderful. But though he wasn’t cool in 1989, he was certainly respected. This was three years after So, which went triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. It was the same year In Your Eyes achieved immortality when it was blasted from a stereo held aloft by John Cusack in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. And the album in question was the soundtrack to a Scorsese film about Jesus.

No question about it, Passion was an Important Album by An Artist of Note. And it won the New Age Grammy! In previous years, the award went to an eccentric harpist, a jazz veteran and a “chamber jazz” band. In 1990, it was won by an artist everyone knew, and millions loved. Did this legitamise the award, and the genre? Is this the year new age went mainstream?

If the creation of this award was a year zero for new age music, then 1990 was the year the genre came of age. If the term “new age” ever meant anything other than candles, dolphins, crystals and incense, after 1990 it could never mean anything else.

But was the album that forever cemented the idea of new age music any good? Let’s find out!

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Yusef Lateef’s Inner Visions of Inner Landscapes

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Yusef Lateef Little Symphony

The second album to win the Grammy for Best New Age Recording will certainly take you places. You might not necessarily enjoy the journey, but the destination is bliss.

The late Yusef Lateef was a worldly innovator, a boundary-breaker who never once rested on his laurels. He didn’t so much book studio time as set himself new challenges – fresh fusions to try, fresh frontiers to conquer. His body of work is an ocean of sound, and I’m still paddling in the shallows.

Up until very recently, I’d only heard one of his albums: 1957’s Before Dawn, which I acquired through Jonny Trunk’s astoundingly generous 50p Friday initiative. Trunk describes Before Dawn as “one of the greatest jazz records of all time.” And while I don’t think I’d count it among my very favourites, its irresistibly groovy progressive bop sounds are often exactly the sort of sounds I want to hear.

30 years after Before Dawn, Yusef Lateef would win the Grammy Award for Best New Age Recording for Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony. As a band leader, it was at least his 37th album. It also seems it was the last record he ever put out.

To go straight from the warm and organic Before Dawn to the austere and paranoid Little Symphony was a bit of a shock. I can only imagine the adventures that took place between his late 50s cool and his late 80s visionary period. I’ve got a lot of listening to do!

But first, let’s munch over the mysterious odyssey that won the New Age Grammy in 1988.

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Ultraprog!

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Ultraprog Wizard

Can I shock you? I love prog rock.

This much-maligned genre delivers songs like symphonies and albums like Chinese puzzle boxes. Structures to get lost in and lyrics you can chew on. It’s colourful, expansive, visionary, and oh so beautifully naff.

Today I’d like to talk about a concept that I call Ultraprog. This is where a prog rock song just pushes itself that little bit further. Intensity builds. Maybe the tempo increases, or the band introduces a particularly fiddly riff. Things go interstellar – heavenly, or hellish. It’s one of those things that you just know when you hear it.

To better explain what I mean by ULTRAPROG, I’m going to show rather than tell. Here are a number of examples of moments in songs where things jump from prog to Ultraprog.

Please note: There will be no examples of Ultraprog moments from Tool, Yes, or Emerson Lake and Palmer. This is because these three bands seem to exist in a state of perpetual Ultraprog. It’s all they know. You can’t really take things higher or further when your starting point is so intense already!

So light some incense, pour yourself some green tea, and come along and Ultraprog with me.

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