What About Me? - 1 Giant Leap

Author

Graeme Watson

Published

Monday 29th June

In 2001 Former Faithless member Andy Cato joined Duncan Bridgeman to form 1 Giant Leap. They travelled the world with a camera and a laptop creating a film and CD that brought together diverse selection of guests artists from a range of genres who were teamed up with traditional world music sounds spiced up with extra dance electronica. At the end of the journey they had a CD and a film and the lead single ‘My Culture’ was a significant hit featuring Faithless rapper Maxi Jazz and Robbie Williams.

Now in 2009 they’re back with a double album of more of the same, with a signifcant number of the guests back on board again including Speech, Maxi Jazz, Babba Maal, Eddi Reader, Michael Stipe Michael Franti and Maxi Jazz who are joined by KD Lang, Daniel Lanois, Will Young, Alanis Morisette and a cavalcade of world music artists. KD Lang shines with ‘Wounded In All The Right Places’ which has gently plucked guitars and atmospheric chanting perflectly bleding with her restrained vocals. Michael Stipe once agains delivers an album hihglight teaming up with Aluta on ‘I have seen trouble’, it’s halfway through the track before Stipe’s deep voice enters lifting the track to a higher plane and their’s a beatiful subtely in the guest vocals on ‘Each Step Moves Us Forward’ which is performed by Speech and Zap Mama.

In comparision to their first selection the world musical ellements are more pronounced and varied in their selection, a greater inclusion of arabic sounds and bold juxtapositions against romany rhythms, african beats and south american chants. Is it a blatant rip off of someone else’s culture to create a cut and paste of global rhythms set to a dance beat or the development of a world-wide sound? With 19 tracks in total many of the songs end up sounding very similar. Listening through the album you can’t help but wonder how creative approaches like this will be viewed in 20 years time, but there are some great tracks amongst the global mish mash.