New Music Monday

Whoops, I plum forgot today was new music Monday. Good thing it's still Monday...

Being as how yesterday was Easter--and I hope you all had a great one!--I thought something relating to the Easter story might be good. So this week's record is a bit old but fits in quite well. It's Passion, by Peter Gabriel.



This project is the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's excellent film, The Last Temptation of Christ. I read the book when I was in college and absolutely fell in love with it. The movie was true to the story, and the music really helped it come alive.

There's no mistaking the fact that this is a modern soundtrack--traditional beats and rhythms, etc. But what makes it interesting is that Gabriel used musicians who were little known in the US, but who were well-known in the Middle East and Africa. Gabriel helped pioneer bringing "world music" to the US, and this album was a seminal contribution to this effort. Gabriel also won his first Grammy Award for this album.

Wikipedia.org has a great article about the album here. Although it was originally released almost 20 years ago, it was remastered (along with the rest of Gabriel's catalog) in 2002 and is easily found on Amazon.com and other sites.

If you're not a world music devotee, give it a listen and see what you think. It's good mood music and, in fact, is on in the background as I write this post now.

More later...