A call to worship, that’s what do’a, the original Arabic-Persian name for New Age group Do’ah means. World Dance by Do’ah slots into that imperfect crevice where good ideas fall prey to bad ones (due to appearing over earnestness) look for one false move to write off the whole shebang written as unnecessary/dated. If you’ve heard some of the music by Kenneth Nash, Shadowfax, and Codona, you have a semblance of what World Dance sounds like. With open ears and a bit of timely distance, Do’ah now sounds more interesting than they led on, originally.
World Dance is New Age dance music with a heavy world music influence. Do’ah began in New Hampshire, in the mid ‘70s, as a duo led by Randy Armstrong (guitarist/assorted world percussion) and Ken LaRoche (flute/assorted world percussion). Influenced by the Weather Report and all sorts of non-western music of the African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern type, the only gigs Do’a (as they were known then) could find was in the folk circuit where their mix of music/instrumentation sorta made sense. World music didn’t exist as a genre for them to slot in then. By the time they recorded their debut, Light Upon Light, they stumbled musically into a little-practiced genre called “New Age” that seemed to appeal to their more esoteric musical ideas.
Featuring a glowing quote by Dizzy Gillespie stating how Do’a was the “future of our music”, their debut’s success allowed them to build on each consecutive release their vision of music driven by classical, world, and jazz ideas. With time, as they augmented the group with more players they moved into a musical world where there original ideas started to deviate from any specific worldly tradition. Jams started to coalesce more into actual songs that could be more than just meditative improvisations. Leaving the confines of the small Vermont-based Philo record label, as a group now known as Do’ah (to differentiate themselves from the punk group D.O.A.) they shot for a different kind of “life affirming” music.
Their final album for Philo, 1981’s Companions Of The Crimson Coloured Ark, as the Do’a World Music Ensemble, found Do’a integrating a more muscular sound one driven newfound technology and a search for a higher fidelity. Less meandering than before, it seems Do’a aimed for actual airplay (and for some kind of entry into the jazz and now-growing New Age market. Streamlining a lot of their world music influences, you could hear Do’a sacrificing some of the original ethos to meet the larger, possible audience half-way. Now a tighter-sounding outfit, with the push of a larger label like Global Pacific (home of similar-minded artists like Steve Kindler, Georgia Kelly, and Teja Bell) they had a chance to make that final move only hinted at before.
Recorded and released in 1988, four years later after their final push as Do’a, Do’ah saw them rebranding themselves as a technologically-driven quintet looking to make world music-influenced dance music. At the height of New Age music’s popularity, Do’ah’s World Dance (with all its warts) played to their strengths. Easily serving as a great entryway to their earlier far more deep “world” music sound, it also functions as a better slice of now, contemporary-sounding groove experiments.
Songs like “Wayo”, in spite of it rocketing this album up to #7 on the Billboard charts, and sounding a shade too much like elevator music, build to certain undeniable groove workouts that hint at Balearic hinterlands. Spreading into smoother territories allow the group’s impressive chops to actually grow positively in the taste department. Notably, synthetic sounds like those of “Night Season” aren’t discarded as “unbecoming” but are actually used as launching points for spirited sophisticated multi-layered dance sprawls. On, arguably, the album’s highlight: “Moth-Like Lovers Of The Light”, complexly woven world music displays a muscularity and sensitivity (touching on both sonic hemispheres equally) spinning another creative unique dance song with no firm footing in either the New Age, jazz, or world music world. Brilliant stuff.
The album ends on a truly inspired pseudo-symphony dedicated to the UN’s International Year of Peace and from some of the writings by the Bahá’í faith’s Universal House of Justice. Vocals sparkle with lofty, quite New Age-y incantations, like repeating the many translations of the word “peace” in other languages. Music sparkles with heady, anthemic meditations reaching for the stratosphere. And on songs like “19 Letters” and “World Dance”, pieces of this symphony, positively radiate gorgeous New Age incantations proudly showing some of the promise in that much maligned genre. Wonderfully optimistic, in a way we were wont to be back then, Do’ah’s World Dance is a gentle reminder that you should, perhaps, let go of some of that misguided baggage holding you back from truly enjoying stuff like this.