Traveling light

The small world of Putumayo

I've always been an advocate of paying attention to how music travels, how it never stays in one place but circulates between different cultures and different countries and makes identities possible that governments and census bureaus could never predict or police. But equating music with travel or, worse, using travel as the only lens to understand music is another matter entirely, and it's one that has long been at the core of how "world music" has been marketed to Western consumers.

One of the lowest examples of this approach was Island Records' 1997 Island Outpost 2 compilation. In the CD booklet, next to the track listings for the 10 songs hand-picked to convey postcard "islandness" (none of them by artists from any island country), were glossy photos of tourist hotels owned by Island president Chris Blackwell in the Bahamas and Jamaica. Blackwell even included 1-800 travel-agent numbers in case the music got you in the mood.

The compilations in Putumayo's ongoing "Musical Odyssey" series, which either focus on regional soundscapes (A Mediterranean Odyssey) or chart cross-cultural "Let's Go Music" travelogues prone to titular alliteration (Dublin to Dakar, Cairo to Casablanca, Mali to Memphis), don't come with built-in travel agents, but they do reinvent the wheel of conflating all "foreign" music with travel and tourism. The frequent sleeve essays by label CEO Dan Storper invariably include references to his semester studying abroad in Madrid; the CDs are tagged as "exhilarating journeys" and "musical cruises" full of "uplifting sounds and exotic melodies." Even the Putumayo company motto is geared for the listener tourist: "Guaranteed to make you feel good!"

No matter how well-selected some of the tracks are, no matter how detailed and informative the liner notes, no matter how other Putumayo comps like last year's Afro-Latino prove the label's potential for good (free of any "Come Fly with Me" invitations, Afro-Latino let the music, by groups like Senegal's Orchestre Baobab de Dakar and Oakland's Conjunto Cespedes, tell its own stories of movement and exchange between Latin America and Africa), all of the "musical odyssey" expeditions are trapped by their colonialist packaging. They're globetrotting '90s updates of Disneyland's difference-numbing "It's a Small World" kiddie ride, where you float past scene after scene of international puppet people singing the same song in different languages.

On the radar * An Oscar tie: Mariah Carey's dress or Judi Dench winning for eight minutes of screen time and then having the gall to attack her government for giving too much funding to pop music, film, and TV. * Sound experimentalists Los Angeles Free Music Society finally putting out Unboxed (Lightbulb), an affordable 21-track, single-CD distillation of their prohibitively price-tagged 10-CD anthology The Lowest Form of Music. * Andy Bey trading jazz spirituality for electric-funk mysticism on his solo version of "Celestial Blues," the lead cut from his rare 1974 Atlantic album Experience and Judgement (just reissued by Koch International). * Ginuwine, Ginuwine, Ginuwine.

All of them come adorned with Putumayo's trademark jewel-box-as-global-diorama cover designs, which feature Nicola Heindl's craftsy drawings of world-music citizens in various states of work and play. Mediterraneanites sail and ride bicycles over grassy hills, Native Americans dressed like Hollywood Indians play flutes and bang drums, Celts strum harps next to smiling crescent moons -- the blow of otherness repeatedly made infantile and childlike, safely caged by tradition.

This only gets worse when you realize that Putumayo have yet to put out a nationally based compilation. The sole sense of place it allows is either regional or continental. I have no doubt that Putumayo's intentions are noble: proceeds from each odyssey album go to various organizations relevant to each slice of musical geography, and detailed biographies of individual artists are always provided. But by celebrating the world as one big musical Travel Planet, it erases the enduring importance of the local -- the very place where meanings and music are produced. Specific cultures and histories are made to mean less than the transnational "expeditions" and "voyages" they are a part of, leaving single artists to stand in for entire cultures and countries.

The latest Putumayo odyssey -- Mali to Memphis, which finds Muddy Waters breaking with company policy by blurting out his localness on "My Home Is in the Delta" -- is perhaps the most tragically mispackaged result. Including artists from the west coast of Africa (Habib Koite, Lobi Traore) and African-American blues singers from the North and South (Taj Mahal, Jessie Mae Hemphill) the CD charts a sonic cartography possible only because of slavery.

Yet the transatlantic slave trade was not an "odyssey" in the Putumayo sense; it was not a trip that any African wanted to take. No matter how carried away we get with cultural globalism -- with buying and selling what anthropologist Steve Feld has called "danceable ethnicity" -- travel is not the same thing as coerced displacement.