This comes from 1985. WOMAD was still a fledgling organisation, and you forget how pioneering they were in the spread of 'world music'. fRoots was still called Folk Roots, I don't know if Songlines existed back then (I wasn't aware of it), and BBC Radio 3 didn't have a world music strand of programming. I don't think Peter Gabriel, a WOMAD founder, had even started his Real World label in 1985.
WOMAD must have realised the potential audience for this stuff had great difficulty finding out anything about the players, and that's what led them to try the 'Talking Book' format. It's a 20-page 12" by 12" magazine, with a record featuring Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Balinese gamelan music, Orchestre Jazira, Ben Baddoo, Willie Clancy, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party, and six others. The information is rich but it's not glossy, and it has an exclusive interview with the late Simon Jeffes — see picture below. The music's probably been licensed to appear on several other albums, so I expect the book bit is the most valuable now.
Being Volume 1 of the Talking Book series, this covers music from across the whole world. The later volumes were things like An Introduction to Africa, An Introduction to Europe and so on. None of them were ever released on CD.
You buy this kind of album as a 'sampler' — you don't expect to like everything on it. You just hope it may contain a handful of good tracks that point the way to new areas of music to explore. Toto la Momposina's Soledad, which is just vocals and percussion, stands out for me. It's from Colombia.
This record must have come out in the first half of 1985, as it includes an advert for the July WOMAD Festival at Mersea Island (which Jeremy and I went to). I think I probably bought it later the same year.
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