World Ballads

This is the latest in Network’s usually excellent two-disc ‘longbox’ series. A decade or so ago, the similarly packaged Desert Blues and Sufi Soul compilations on Christian Scholze’s Frankfurt-based label helped to define the genres they highlighted and shaped our tastes for them. World Ballads is a much more nebulous concept. Several of the 29 tracks have little to do with conventional notions of what constitutes a ‘ballad’ (one is even an instrumental) and the liner notes redefine the form as ‘an invitation to dream, smooch, doze, fantasize, reflect, to drift through landscapes, to indulge ideas and sometimes to enjoy a small festival of idleness. Silly old me, with my old-fashioned notion that a ballad had something to do with storytelling. Under Scholze’s broad reinterpretation, a ballad is any piece of music taken at a slow – and in some cases soporific – tempo, drawn from Network’s 30-year back catalogue. The result is a hopelessly one-paced collection, lacking any sense of dynamics. The selection also seems somewhat arbitrary. It is unclear why we need three tracks from the same CD by Paris-based Gypsies Bratsch, or a brace apiece from the Secret Love album by the Greek singer Georgia Dagaki and from an obscure album by Curaçao’s Izaline Calister. A single example of each of them would have sufficed. We also get two tracks by the pan-Balkan Sandy Lopicic Orkestar, a band described as ‘wild ’ in the liner notes, although you would never guess it from the over-polite tracks here. For no discernible reason, slow tracks from Youssou N’Dour, the Ethiopian singer Gigi and Senegal’s Magou are added, and there you pretty much have it. There’s nothing wrong with this music, one hastens to add. As we’ve come to expect from Network, individually most of the tracks are fine. But as a concept, World Ballads is simply too woolly to work.