Worldly goods from 1 Giant Leap

By STEPHEN JEWELL

When Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman - the pair behind the globetrotting, self-titled album 1 Giant Leap - embarked on their multimedia journey around the world, New Zealand wasn't on the itinerary.

Artist/producer Bridgeman and former Faithless member Catto visited India, Africa and America, where they recorded the album and filmed a documentary with a diverse range of collaborators including writer Kurt Vonnegut, Senegalese singer Baaba Maal and the voice of Bollywood movies, Asha Bhosle. Other voices on the album include Neneh Cherry, Michael Franti, rapper Speech (ex-Arrested Development) and recent visitor Grant Lee Phillips.

However, after Catto made a lightning detour to Auckland to visit his daughter, who was living on Waiheke Island, he and Bridgeman were so inspired by Aotearoa that many local artists, such as Whiri Mako Black and George Nuku, were quickly added to the burgeoning ranks of 1 Giant Leap's global village.

"The time we spent in New Zealand was some of the most precious of the whole trip and very unexpected," says Catto, who adds that 1 Giant Leap was the reason why he left his former band Faithless.

"We weren't really planning to do any work, but when we got there Michael Franti from Spearhead said, 'You've got to get in touch with my mate, Inia Taylor.' So we met Inia and he introduced us to the local culture. We ended up recording and filming some of the best stuff in the whole film in New Zealand."

Catto visited the Once Were Warriors tattoo designer at his Grey Lynn parlour, Ta Moko, which was where he first heard Whiri Mako Black's debut album Shrouded in the Mist. "I had a moko with Inia and it was Whiri Mako's voice coming out of his stereo while it was going on and it was like an anaesthetic. It was the most amazing experience. Her voice really transported me during those two six-hour sessions and the moment it was finished, I was like: 'Who is she? Let's go and find her'."

Black, who has just released her second album Hohou Te Rongo (which means "to cultivate peace"), features on two of 1 Giant Leap's tracks, Ta Moko and The Way You Dream, where she shares vocal duties with REM's Michael Stipe and India's Asha Bhosle.

"I feel quite privileged," says Black. "I'm fulfilling a part of my dream of singing with other indigenous cultures. It's a mixing and blending of cultures, a collaboration. For example, there's a chanting voice that comes in on Ta Moko straight after I sing the first verse. If I didn't already know that it comes from another country, I could quite easily mistake that voice for how our old people sound."

Catto named Ta Moko after Taylor's premises but, according to Black, the waiata that she sings on the track has much older origins.

"They've used their creative licence to call it Ta Moko but the waiata that is on there is called Te tangi a Tamapahore," says Black. "I'm from the Bay of Plenty and the origins of that song come from the people of Mataatua. We are all of one. We've got Tuhoi and the Ngati Awa tribes but we all come from brothers and sisters. That particular waiata is from the brother to the sister that our tribe comes from."

Taylor also introduced 1 Giant Leap to sculptor George Nuku, who provides a spoken prologue to the album's first single My Culture, a duet between Robbie Williams and Catto's former Faithless bandmate, Maxi Jazz.

Black believes that the two vocalists must have heard the introduction before recording their contributions as Jazz's rap, in particular, echoes Nuku's declaration of being "a representative of a long line of people that goes back to the beginning of time. When we meet other lines of people, we bring together the lines of men."

"Listening to what Maxi Jazz is saying, I have a strong feeling that the talk about ancestors and your culture came from the Maori," says Black. "That's something that a lot of us have been saying for the last 10 years. We've been so proud of the whole reclaiming and acknowledging of our culture. I have a passion for genealogy and that's been part of my journey. I want to know my ancestry a thousand years back, not just two to three hundred."

But perhaps My Culture merely encapsulates the universal experiences of all indigenous, and indeed non-indigenous, people. That's what the project is about, says Catto. "We love listening to people from all over the world express themselves with soul but none of the [similar] albums we've come across have successfully delivered what's so great about them.

"We wanted to put what's so great about Baaba Maal, Whiri Mako Black or the Mahotella Queens in an unmistakable context so that no one could miss how brilliant they all were. And not just world [music] people but also your Robbies, Eddi Readers and Michael Stipes. It wasn't just limited to ethnic unknowns. Chris Blackwell (from 1 Giant Leap's label Palm Pictures) gave us the luxury to go around the world and do it in the field, in people's houses, the desert, jungle or on a boat, wherever we could take our laptops.

"But the unity and diversity didn't just come from musicians, it also came from our favourite writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and from people from all different walks of life. The more diversity we found, the more unity shone through and that was what was so juicy for us as artists."

* 1 Giant Leap is released this week.