Peter Gabriel sets out to save the world

Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times

OK, so cut Peter Gabriel some slack for taking too long to finish an album: "Big Blue Ball," a long-simmering world music project he launched back in 1991, finally survaced this week.

In the intervening 17 years, he's released four other collections of his music, launched a music download website (www.We7 .com), continued nurturing WOMAD, the world music and dance festival he started in 1982 and launched a lifestyle-driven site (thefilter.com).

He also assembled The Elders, a group of about a dozen world leaders, including former South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, with the aim of bringing their collective experience to bear on the planet's social and political problems.

Meanwhile, "Big Blue Ball" sat. And sat. And sat. He has been busy, but it has taken nearly two decades for Gabriel and his collaborators to get a lasso around this large-scale effort.

Over the course of four years, Gabriel threw open the doors of his recording studios for a week at a time, 24 hours a day. That way, musicians he'd invited to participate in WOMAD would have a forum to collaborate on new sounds and new ideas, unencumbered by geographical, musical or budgetary limitations.

"Big Blue Ball" features collaborations between Gabriel and U.S. roots-gospel group the Holmes Brothers (on the album's first single, "Burn You Up, Burn You Down"), Irish singer Iarla O Lionaird and Papa Wemba's Congolese band and Japanese percussionist Joji Hirota with Sinead O'Connor. About half the songs are in English, others are in Arabic, Congolese, Hungarian, Swahili and Madagascar languages.

It's eclectic, but there's a rhythmic pulse to most of the tracks that underscores the many-cultures, one-world idea.

Engineer Richard Chappell, who worked on most of the sessions, recalled that "in the first year, nobody quite knew what to do. In the second year, people started to get more excited about what was happening, and by the third time people had really figured it out. We'd have up to 20 different recording sessions going on in various places at the same time. If it wasn't raining, there'd be people set up outside with portable studios."

Gabriel gave the task of sorting through mountains of raw material to Stephen Hague, who has produced albums by Pet Shop Boys, Robbie Williams and others, Chappell and mixing engineer Tchad Blake.

"There were a lot of wonderful performances," Hague said, "but a lot of them were really unformed ... My background is more in contemporary pop music, and I'm a real structuralist. My goal was to try to get these things to read from beginning to end, and in the end, I think the album reflects that."

Gabriel and his main "Big Blue Ball" partner, Karl Wallinger of World Party, were more interested in songs than an free-form international jam session.

"Jamming can be fantastic for those people who are participating in it, but it's not always great for the audience," Gabriel said. "So Karl and I mostly stayed in the upstairs room and tried to steer people more toward actual songwriting."

"Big Blue Ball" represents something larger for a performer whose career has been defined by a commitment to exploding conventions, either through his epic prog-rock excursions as the original lead singer of Genesis, through his genre-bending solo albums of the '70s and '80s and through his groundbreaking music videos in the early days of MTV.

Gabriel simply wants to change the fundamental shape of what music can and should be. "I always thought the digital revolution would actually change the content of music, the way same way the piano roll or the 45- rpm single did," he said. "But it's been very slow to come. I really feel there should be a cultural renaissance that digital technology could advance.

"Now, not only can we make records very cheaply, but the costs of distribution have been virtually eliminated," Gabriel continued.