On the Edge with Eddie Jobson: "Globe Music" and Beyond
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The pairing of Jobson and the Bulgarian Women’s Choir was kismet. During the choir’s successful U.S. tours between 1987 and 1989, Jobson was living on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, absorbing socca and reggae, completely oblivious to their music. But in 1993, friend and former UK bandmate John Wetton played him the beguiling, otherworldly sounds of the choir, and Jobson was awestruck. “The level of dissonance and harmonic complexity was incredible,” the composer recalls. “The fact that they could actually sing this was astounding to me. There was just such a rich musicality to it and [such] depth and history. It tapped into something from my childhood.” That connection was his exposure to a myriad of forms of Balkan folk music and African music through the still-active Billingham International Folklore Festival, co-founded by Jobson’s father in his hometown in northern England.

All the young dudes: Jobson in his days with UK
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As a curtain boy at the theater, Jobson was exposed to performers from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Ukraine and Hungary. “At the time, I was a classical musician but was exposed to all of this rich, deep folk music—the accordions, the cymbalom, the gaida, which is a kind of bagpipe instrument, and double-reeded, Middle Eastern-sounding instruments. All of this was part of my upbringing.” It also tied into Jobson’s love of Russian classical music. “Listening to the Bulgarians’ music tapped into early feelings that I had about this music of the region.”

The choir’s 2,000-year musical history further tantalized the accomplished musician. “They have parts of their singing that are still diaphonic,” marvels Jobson. “This is a vestige of early polyphony when Bulgaria was isolated from the rest of the world [for 1,000 years], just before polyphonic harmony developed in Western Europe. And the fact that you can still hear that in their music now—these diaphonic lines or soloists singing over a single drone—is fascinating.”

Even more compelling for Jobson was the fact that the choir has spent the last 50 years pursuing innovative ideas. “The Soviets brought in extraordinary, contemporary classical composers who have tried to do extremely cutting-edge things with the choir,” he notes. The Bulgarians’ other collaborations also echo Jobson’s own progressive predilections. They have worked with the Kodo drummers of Japan, the Tuuvan throat singers Huun Huur-Tu, the Moscow Art Trio and a flamenco singer from Spain. Add to that list an art rocker with an equally eclectic career. “It shows a good spirit of innovation that they’re prepared to embrace all kinds of music,” he says.

Once he heard them, the mesmerizing sounds of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir ignited Jobson’s imagination. He began formulating a project that he felt would take progressive music into the next century. He had no desire to relive his days with UK, but he wanted to take what they had done and extrapolate where progressive music might have gone in the last two decades—beyond the jazz and classical influences that were paramount to ’70s prog rockers like UK, ELP and Yes. Inspired by the global village that modern technology was helping to build, Jobson began to look at bringing in music that had escaped the embrace of past progressive rockers—such as blues, funk, and most importantly, world music—as well as to free the style from a stringently structured, nearly academic viewpoint.

“What I came up with was what I now call ‘globe music,’” remarks Jobson. “The difference between globe music and world music is that world music tends to still be very ethnic and favors the Third World. Globe music recognizes somewhat more cultured musical styles and tries to incorporate them into an amalgamation of other somewhat more cultured musical styles.”

Integrating the Bulgarian choir into the Legacy project was far more complex than it sounds. Jobson faced a series of hurdles in taking his own words and making them singable by the choir. “The first challenge was understanding what their music was, where the style originated and learning all these stylistic elements that were combined into this sonic montage that is the Bulgarian Women’s Choir.”

Reprinted with permission from

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