Big Blue Ball in Rolling Stone

By Mark Kemp, RollingStone.com

View Big Blue Ball (Peter Gabriel)'s page on Rhapsody

Gabriel fans hoping for a follow-up to 2002's Up will have to keep waiting. Big Blue Ball is neither new nor is it strictly Gabriel, although the pioneering art rocker's aesthetic stamp (and, on four songs, his voice) is all over this global-music mosaic. In the early Nineties, Gabriel staged a series of jam sessions at his Real World Studios in the English countryside, where musicians ranging from Sinéad O'Connor to Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid to soukous legend Papa Wemba sang or played over multilayered dub and rock, swirling electronics, pan-African polyrhythms, Spanish guitar, Asian percussion, snaky Egyptian orchestration and more.

After 17 years of meticulous production, the result of this modern-traditional fusion, though ambitious, is a bit uneven. Individually, tracks like Malagasy singer Rossy's mash-up of rap, electronics, funk and jazz on "Jijy" or Hungarian singer Márta Sebestyén's minimalist beauty, "Rivers," can be mesmerizing. But old-style prog-rock pretentiousness sometimes rears its head, such as on the Joseph Arthur-sung throwback "Altus Silva," which sounds as though it arrived straight from the Court of the Crimson King.

Big Blue Ball (Peter Gabriel)

• Genre: Worldbeat
• Big Blue Ball (Peter Gabriel) Website

About

More a collective of musicians than a typical band, Big Blue Ball dates back to the mid-1990s, when Peter Gabriel orchestrated week-long invitational sessions at his Real World Studios that brought in players from around the world. Given Gabriel's late-career interest in global music, the guests included heavy hitters of world music alongside those of western pop -- everyone from Natacha Atlas, Papa Wemba to Sinead O'Connor and Vernon Reid -- but Gabriel's closest ally was Welsh musician Karl Wallinger. Some years after the majority of the sessions were recorded, Gabriel called on Stephen Hague to sort out the pile of tape and iron out a collaborative LP to be released under the Big Blue Ball moniker. Since most of the sessions were taken from the mid and late '90s, the project has the optimistic sheen of the synthesized world pop fusions of that era, led by a group of fiery vocalists that includes Gabriel himself.

Nate Cavalieri