TUE., AUGUST 28, 2007
If Six Degrees Was Ten
by Richard Gehr
San Francisco ethno-eclectico-electronica label Six Degrees turns ten years old this year, and I can't imagine any release marking the occasion better than my favorite new album, Dub Qawwali, a beautifully executed posthumous remixture of qawwali king Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by the London producer Gaudi. Nusrat died in August 1997 just as Six Degrees founders Bob Duskis and Pat Berry were gearing up to blend the era's burgeoning electronic dance esthetic with regional sounds from around the globe.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if it wasn't two German guys using tiny little pygmy samples, like on the Deep Forest albums," Duskis recently recalled musing back then. "What if you instead had electronic producers in India blending the music of their homeland with electronic music and music from Africa and Brazil?"
Gaudi runs with that mandate on Dub Qawwali, adding flutes, strings and tablas to previously unreleased Nusrat vocal tracks from the '60s and '70s, folding them all together into a lilting, echoing sauce of warm analog Jamaican dub production techniques. Gaudi cuts to the melodic core of Nusrat's music, setting into relief blissful South Asian melodies that might otherwise have been overwhelmed by the intensity and passion of the live qawwali experience. Gaudi artfully steers us to another, subtler Nusrat than we may have thought we knew by recontextualizing him. So "Ena Akhiyan Noo" resembles a glorious rub-a-dub opera, and Kraftwerk's slinky 1977 synth-pop classic "The Model" makes a guest appearance in "Dil Da Rog Muka."
Duskis and Berry met while doing A&R and sales & marketing, respectively, for Windham Hill Records, where they received a crash course in branding and nontraditional ways of getting semipopular music to receptive niche audiences. After a brief stint at Island Records, the pair raised the venture capital to go indie in 1998. Record companies are brands no less than any other life-style product, and Six Degrees had a distinctive sound and visuals (colorfully exotic imagery on enviro-friendly gatefold album covers) from the get-go. The label's initial releases consisted of Algerian DJ-producer Cheb I Sabbah's raga-rocking Shri Durga; Bossacucanova's Revisited Classics, a well-chilled take on bossa nova chestnuts; and the first volume of the label's annual Traveler collections. Dub Qawwali bookends these perfectly.
You've probably heard a lot of Six Degrees music already without being aware of it.
A fortuitous partnership with Belgian label Crammed Discs' Brazilian imprint, Zuriguiboom led to the 2000 release of Bebel Gilberto's million-selling Tanto Tempo, Six Degrees' most successful release. Although Brazilians themselves were somewhat late (and apparently somewhat suspicious) adopters of João Gilberto's daughter, boutiques and lounges around the world were soon percolating with Bebel's breathy voice and producer Suba's subtle bubbling beats — multiplied by the doppelganger albums of remixes that follow each of Bebel's (and many other Six Degrees artists') releases. Yugoslavian-born Suba moved to Brazil in 1990 and died in a fire at his São Paolo home in 1999, shortly before the release of Tanto Tempo. His only solo album, São Paolo Confessions, is a minor masterpiece of regional electronica, and you can hear his influence in Brazilian music as diverse as Celso Fonseca's neo-bossa magic and in the freaky folkiness of both Céu and Cibelle.
Six Degrees has staked out its geography of the ears many other places as well. North Africa is amplified by DJ Cheb I Sabbah, most notably on La Kahena, his stunning tribute to the female vocalists of his Algerian boyhood. India is represented by the young Midival Punditz, with US-born Karsh Kale a prolific Bay Area transmitter of cosmic Indian rhythms. Cuba-born singer Bobi Céspedes and the balls-out salsa Spanish Harlem Orchestra add a Latin tinge. Niyaz consists of two Iranian expats and hot Hollywood producer Carmen Rizzo. And serene afropop wonder Issa Bagayogo was born in a poor village in southern Mali, where he still lives.
The Six Degrees discography is also punctuated by such eclectic fare as former Nine Inch Nails drummer Chris Vrenna's electrogothic alter ego Tweaker, singer-songwriter Stephen Coates's pretty and macabre The Real Tuesday Weld, Roy Nathanson's smoking jazz-theater work Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill, and even ubiquitous jam-fest skanker Michael "How Ya Feelin'?" Franti and Spearhead. Acts like these testify to Duskis and Berry's regard for Chris Blackwell-era Island Records (the largest indie label in history), when the likes of Bob Marley, U2, King Sunny Ade, Traffic, and King Crimson could co-exist.
You've probably heard a lot of Six Degrees music already without being aware of it. Duskis and Berry vigorously promote their artists' music for film, TV, and commercial use, which is what indie boutique labels like Six Degrees (and Luaka Bop and Putumayo) have to do to stay in business these days. This probably has something to do with Thomas "Mustache of Knowledge" Friedman's theory of the world's economic flatness, and I for one would rather hear the dulcet strains of, say, Euphoria's delirious "Delirium," Six Degrees' most licensed track, than a whole lot of other things. So sample on, Six Degrees. Sample on.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if it wasn't two German guys using tiny little pygmy samples, like on the Deep Forest albums," Duskis recently recalled musing back then. "What if you instead had electronic producers in India blending the music of their homeland with electronic music and music from Africa and Brazil?"
Gaudi runs with that mandate on Dub Qawwali, adding flutes, strings and tablas to previously unreleased Nusrat vocal tracks from the '60s and '70s, folding them all together into a lilting, echoing sauce of warm analog Jamaican dub production techniques. Gaudi cuts to the melodic core of Nusrat's music, setting into relief blissful South Asian melodies that might otherwise have been overwhelmed by the intensity and passion of the live qawwali experience. Gaudi artfully steers us to another, subtler Nusrat than we may have thought we knew by recontextualizing him. So "Ena Akhiyan Noo" resembles a glorious rub-a-dub opera, and Kraftwerk's slinky 1977 synth-pop classic "The Model" makes a guest appearance in "Dil Da Rog Muka."
Duskis and Berry met while doing A&R and sales & marketing, respectively, for Windham Hill Records, where they received a crash course in branding and nontraditional ways of getting semipopular music to receptive niche audiences. After a brief stint at Island Records, the pair raised the venture capital to go indie in 1998. Record companies are brands no less than any other life-style product, and Six Degrees had a distinctive sound and visuals (colorfully exotic imagery on enviro-friendly gatefold album covers) from the get-go. The label's initial releases consisted of Algerian DJ-producer Cheb I Sabbah's raga-rocking Shri Durga; Bossacucanova's Revisited Classics, a well-chilled take on bossa nova chestnuts; and the first volume of the label's annual Traveler collections. Dub Qawwali bookends these perfectly.
A fortuitous partnership with Belgian label Crammed Discs' Brazilian imprint, Zuriguiboom led to the 2000 release of Bebel Gilberto's million-selling Tanto Tempo, Six Degrees' most successful release. Although Brazilians themselves were somewhat late (and apparently somewhat suspicious) adopters of João Gilberto's daughter, boutiques and lounges around the world were soon percolating with Bebel's breathy voice and producer Suba's subtle bubbling beats — multiplied by the doppelganger albums of remixes that follow each of Bebel's (and many other Six Degrees artists') releases. Yugoslavian-born Suba moved to Brazil in 1990 and died in a fire at his São Paolo home in 1999, shortly before the release of Tanto Tempo. His only solo album, São Paolo Confessions, is a minor masterpiece of regional electronica, and you can hear his influence in Brazilian music as diverse as Celso Fonseca's neo-bossa magic and in the freaky folkiness of both Céu and Cibelle.
Six Degrees has staked out its geography of the ears many other places as well. North Africa is amplified by DJ Cheb I Sabbah, most notably on La Kahena, his stunning tribute to the female vocalists of his Algerian boyhood. India is represented by the young Midival Punditz, with US-born Karsh Kale a prolific Bay Area transmitter of cosmic Indian rhythms. Cuba-born singer Bobi Céspedes and the balls-out salsa Spanish Harlem Orchestra add a Latin tinge. Niyaz consists of two Iranian expats and hot Hollywood producer Carmen Rizzo. And serene afropop wonder Issa Bagayogo was born in a poor village in southern Mali, where he still lives.
The Six Degrees discography is also punctuated by such eclectic fare as former Nine Inch Nails drummer Chris Vrenna's electrogothic alter ego Tweaker, singer-songwriter Stephen Coates's pretty and macabre The Real Tuesday Weld, Roy Nathanson's smoking jazz-theater work Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill, and even ubiquitous jam-fest skanker Michael "How Ya Feelin'?" Franti and Spearhead. Acts like these testify to Duskis and Berry's regard for Chris Blackwell-era Island Records (the largest indie label in history), when the likes of Bob Marley, U2, King Sunny Ade, Traffic, and King Crimson could co-exist.
You've probably heard a lot of Six Degrees music already without being aware of it. Duskis and Berry vigorously promote their artists' music for film, TV, and commercial use, which is what indie boutique labels like Six Degrees (and Luaka Bop and Putumayo) have to do to stay in business these days. This probably has something to do with Thomas "Mustache of Knowledge" Friedman's theory of the world's economic flatness, and I for one would rather hear the dulcet strains of, say, Euphoria's delirious "Delirium," Six Degrees' most licensed track, than a whole lot of other things. So sample on, Six Degrees. Sample on.
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