Today, if a record is described as 'world music', most people know exactly what this means: non-Western music from around the world, whether traditional or pop, but usually featuring the use of some kind of traditional instrumentation. The individuality of the specific kinds of music - Indian, Senegalese, Madagascan - is then often sub-divided down from this main classification but it is the term 'world music' that holds everything together into a greater whole.


It hasn't always been so. In the UK of the early 1980s, you had to search long and hard to find this kind of music on disc, visiting specialist record shops like Collett's, Dobell's and Sterns plus subscribing to individual mail-order like Jumbo's African record lists. For the dedicated music fan, this was second nature activity but it hardly made the music accessible to a wider Western audience.

In 1987, a group of music industry people got together and formalised the term 'world music' as a marketing strategy. Among them were Ace Records Roger Armstrong and GlobeStyle Records Ben Mandelson. The need for a marketing 'buzz' word for the music was, at the time, critical. The idea was to implant in the retail business, and in record buyers minds, that world music should be a distinct, identifiable category within their racks and that anyone visiting a high street record store would know exactly where to look for such music (previously they would have to trawl through 'folk', 'jazz', 'pop' and 'film/soundtracks' for often erratic selections).

The term 'world music' was not new. It had been used in the 1970s to describe some of the more esoteric fringes of the jazz world, music by the likes of Don Cherry, Okay Temiz and Sevda and, in 1982, the French had initiated World Music Day on 21 June. However, the push for a genre name for the music was, undoubtedly, spurred on in 1987 by the phenomenal success during the previous year of Paul Simon's 'Graceland' and the demand for music by many of the world music stars whose presence made that album such a global event.

Ace Records has been involved in world music from the very beginning. Its GlobeStyle Records was headed by Ben Mandelson, now a highly acclaimed world music record producer, and his unerring taste for the unusual brought to the label music from almost every country around the world. Yemenite/Israeli songs, high energy soukous from Zaire/Congo, Indian Carnatic mandolin, zither music from Madagascar, powerful topical songs from Rwanda, Bosnian wedding music from a Sarajevo just before the Balkan war, Okinawan pop roots and brand new exhilarating Fuji sounds from Nigeria (plus much more, as one look through the GlobeStyle catalogue pages will attest). Though the label hasn't released any new titles for some years now, its catalogue archive contains numerous essential world music purchases, not least because of the pathfinding, forward-looking nature of the music that has been issued there. What GlobeStyle did in the 1980s and '90s was ahead of most of the competition and consequently is still coming of age.

John Crosby is a leading specialist music publicist/PR, handling UK national press campaigns for such artists as Mariza, Camille, Yasmin Levy, Lila Downs, Thomas Mapfumo, Natacha Atlas, Los De Abajo, Värttinä, Oysterband, Tito Paris, Máire Ní Chathasaigh and Chris Newman, DAM and many others in a career stretching back over twenty years.

John Crosby has contributed extensively to such publications as Q, Mojo, Time Out, fRoots, City Limits and Old Time Music. He authored 'Professor Longhair: a bio-discography' in the early 1980s and has compiled and written the sleeve notes to more than 120 albums containing a wide variety of music -- from American folk to acid jazz -- as befits his eclectic tastes. John recently compiled and sequenced the music (and wrote the accompanying book) for the acclaimed 4-CD box set 'Peter Green: The Anthology'.

He is currently an independent publicist/PR working with such artists as the Portuguese fado singer Mariza, 2008 Mercury Prize nominees The Unthanks, Chumbawamba, Yasmin Levy and The Imagined Village.

For regularly updated CD and tour news, visit John's website at:
(john crosby music publicity/PR): http://www.pressproms.demon.co.uk

Also, check him out at:
(john crosby at myspace): http://www.myspace.com/john_crosby
and
(john's blog): http://blog.myspace.com/john_crosby