Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ

Amazon.com essential recording
To call Peter Gabriel's Passion a pivotal recording in the development of the world music genre would be a significant understatement. What makes Passion so undeniably huge is, of course, its global reach but also its expert handling of what could've easily become polyglot babble. Vocalists Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N'Dour, and Baaba Mal bring strong Middle Eastern and African voicing to the project, and Balkan textures come via the ney flute and doudouk. But Gabriel is the glue, offering electronic ambient flows between the multiple streams. Gabriel also brings something even less tangible: an awesome visual imagination that takes often seamless sounds and makes them impress the listener with picturelike colors and phrasing. This is, however, far more than an ambient global mix. To be certain, the intertwined rhythms stand out but always do so both unto themselves and as brushstrokes on a larger canvas. Never mind that Passion helped launch North American careers for N'Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, this is a stellar musical achievement by any standard. --Andrew Bartlett

Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ,Peter Gabriel,Geffen Records,Pop,Rock,Rock/Pop

Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ

Average customer rating:

Powerful and Timeless Soundtrack
Changed my musical tastes forever
Passion For The Passion
Superior to The Passion of the Christ soundtrack
An Antti Keisala Comment: Also They Saw God

Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ
Peter Gabriel
Manufacturer: Geffen Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000000OR5
Release Date: 1989-06-01

Tracks:

The Feeling Begins
Gethsemane
Of These, Hope
Lazarus Raised
Of These, Hope (Reprise)
In Doubt
A Different Drum
Zaar
Troubled
Open
Before Night Falls
With This Love
Sandstorm
Stigmata
Passion
With This Love (Choir)
Wall Of Breath
The Promise Of Shadows
Disturbed
It Is Accomplished
Bread And Wine

Amazon.com essential recording

To call Peter Gabriel's Passion a pivotal recording in the development of the world music genre would be a significant understatement. What makes Passion so undeniably huge is, of course, its global reach but also its expert handling of what could've easily become polyglot babble. Vocalists Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N'Dour, and Baaba Mal bring strong Middle Eastern and African voicing to the project, and Balkan textures come via the ney flute and doudouk. But Gabriel is the glue, offering electronic ambient flows between the multiple streams. Gabriel also brings something even less tangible: an awesome visual imagination that takes often seamless sounds and makes them impress the listener with picturelike colors and phrasing. This is, however, far more than an ambient global mix. To be certain, the intertwined rhythms stand out but always do so both unto themselves and as brushstrokes on a larger canvas. Never mind that Passion helped launch North American careers for N'Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, this is a stellar musical achievement by any standard. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews:

Powerful and Timeless Soundtrack.......2007-07-17

I was a Peter Gabriel fan for years prior to the release of "Passion," but the arrival of this epic soundtrack was as close to a religious experience for me as an album can get. For years now, it has been the background to many of the most powerful and emotional moments in my memory. THE BEST music for... well, anything intimate or intense. For zoning out and letting your mind fly where it will. For curling up in a ball in the corner and allowing the music to give voice to your own pain and resurrection.

My five year old loves "Passion." I love how he hears something arresting in the middle of a track and will say "Oooh, mommy! Go back, go back quickly! Did you hear that?" His face just gets so thoughtful, and you can see the emotions of the music play over his face. It brings me such joy that we share this together. Thanks again, Peter Gabriel!

Changed my musical tastes forever.......2007-05-14

This album is really as good as everyone says. For those who are religiously inclined you may even feel God while listening to it. Believe me. Peter Gabriel had to have been inspired by a higher power while making it, bringing together a collection of music backgrounds as never done before, a musical 'patron saint'. In the process he has no doubt made the world a better place, by allowing dissimilar cultures to come together and share a common musical bond. To call it his Opus is a woeful understatement. In a hundred years this album will still be remembered as a defining achievement in music. If only we could bring the world together so well and so often, through music. This was my first foray into world music when I bought this in 1989 while in college. It was my first ever CD and I still have it today. Without a doubt it changed my tastes in music forever. I'm still dumbfounded why this man has not been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Passion For The Passion.......2007-04-15

I often find "World Music" dreary when kept in its glass case. It becomes a preservation activity: record X from Y before He/She dies and their Music Is Lost Forever. Whilst this is worthy, it isn't necessarily worthwhile listening to something recorded only because it is going to rust away otherwise.
With "Passion" (the soundtrack to Scorcese's "The Last Temptation Of Christ"), Peter Gabriel succeeds brilliantly in creating a work indebted to World Musicians and yet stamped with his own mark: therefore the album lives and breathes as a work in its own right rather than a fossil of the past or a foreign country. He achieves this by using a strongly north African rhythmical approach coupled with the work of musicians on traditional Middle Eastern string instruments, always focusing on structure to build elements of texture into (rather than onto) each track. Exceptions to this are the stately choral version of "With This Love" and the soaring Western/Middle Eastern hybrid "It Is Accomplished".
With "Passion", Gabriel achieved the difficult task of giving voice to ancient music rather than reverentially keeping it in a case, to be merely caged and catalogued.

Superior to The Passion of the Christ soundtrack .......2007-02-16

I recently purchased both The Passion of the Christ soundtrack and Peter Gabriel's Passion. I really wanted to like The Passion of the Christ score, as I loved the movie. Regrettably, John Debney's music is so much like Peter Gabriel's superb Passion soundtrack, used in 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ that it becomes a farce. It even uses Gabriel's long-time collaborator, vocalist and double violinist Shankar, whose unique sound was also used on Gabriel's Passion. The producers also used a piece from Gabriel's Rabbit Proof Fence soundtrack for The Passion's 2003 teaser trailer. There's no doubt that Debney has copied Gabriel. Also the highlight of The Passion of the Christ is a theme virtually identical to one from John William's Born on the Fourth of July soundtrack.

So buy Gabriel's Passion over The Passion of the Christ, it is a magnificent score and far more original.

An Antti Keisala Comment: Also They Saw God.......2007-02-05

I have started this voyage of commentary by picking up the ones that are close to my heart, but now we're really arriving to the true centre. This album is perhaps the quintenessential album in my short life, the soundtrack of my life, only perhaps a few other albums (namely from Rubinstein or Pärt) slightly echoing the massive impressions it continually paints. As a Gabriel fan in general I still feel this is his best work, the most intimate testament to his skill not only as a musician, but also as a poet.

I don't like the Scorsese film for cinematic reasons alone, and the tapestries of sound drown the images of the film so thoroughly that what breathes through is the visual aspect of Gabriel's music instead of Scorsese's 'images'. And I have seen the film more than a few times (and am still waiting for the likes of Greenaway, Medem and Malick) to change the way we think of the subject cinematically. But how could I ever feel sad that I couldn't make myself like the film, when what it brought to me was an album like this?

Through the perspective of music history and especially through the evolution and migration of world music to the Western world this is already a significant album in itself. So it has merits. But what it has is the original spirit, the passion in the other sense of the word, to create, to express. And it has personal risk written all over it, made by an artist at the peak of his popularity and then taking the chance and making a small record like this. Once again something that I would already applaud for itself alone. This is passion for music, for the urge to create.

One wonderful property of great art is that it takes us along to participate in the creative process, paints an image of it and folds us around it as it encompasses our own space. "The Feeling Begins" and "A Different Drum" remain as the penultimate spiritual chants only succeeded by Gabriel's "Cloudless" in echoing the flowing rhythm of a ritual invocation, reaching from some artificially distant place inside our soul into our soul in this time and place. There is illusion, there is enchantment, there is magic, there is power, there are miracles. And it still, to this day, makes me believe. Not only is this the soundtrack of a whole life, it is, ironically, the soundtrack, a backdrop of inspiration, to any ideal full reading of the Gospels or Psalms I do. Uplifting, life-altering, everything that's from and in between. And I think of Whitmanian ease of being, as he whispers in 'Song of Myself': "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge/that pass all the argument of the earth,/And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,/And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own'. These kind of albums to which you can invest your own soul aren't experiences for experiences' sake, but things to cherish life for.

And I am thankful.

With best regards,
AK

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