Desert Dances

Album Review

The Music of Stars was a descriptively titled album of songs inspired by the background noise of the universe. The Voyage (actually a previously unreleased work recorded in the 1970s but not issued until after the turn of the millennium) contains impressionistic echoes of sea travel. And so 2006's Desert Dances completes the trilogy with an album inspired in part by the indigenous sounds of various North African musical styles. It helps to know that Morris Pert is part of the same old-school U.K. progressive rock scene that includes Peter Gabriel (whose albums Pert has played on in his day job as a session drummer), because Desert Dances bears a strong influence from Gabriel's similar explorations. By some distance Pert's most immediately accessible album, Desert Dances is basically a blend of jazz, progressive rock and ambient music that's spiced with percussion and other accents from Moroccan or other North African forms, but wisely, Pert stops well short of attempting to replicate this music himself. In fact, the best songs here like the languid, jazzy piano improvisation "Tangier Nights," and the circling, mutating keyboard lines of "Mama Quilla," sound more like Another Green World-era Brian Eno or trumpeter Jon Hassell's experiments in ethno-fusion jazz than the average vaguely colonialist "worldbeat" album, and they're all the better for that.