A small step

Introduction

1 Giant Leap is a concept band and media project consisting of Jamie Catto (probably best known for his work with Faithless) and Duncan Bridgeman.

Their first album, released in 2002 saw them travel the world to work with musicians both known and unknown. Some of the names involved with the first project were Michael Stipe, Robbie Williams, Eddi Reader, Tom Robbins, Brian Eno, Baaba Maal, Speech, Asha Bhosle and Neneh Cherry. My Culture (featuring Robbie Williams and Maxi Jazz from Faithless) was the single that got the project noticed, and is a song that I've listened to hundreds of times.



What About Me? is their second global project, and they have been around the world once more, working with lots of different musicians and interviewing lots of other people, capturing their views on the human race. The resulting music is available as a double CD, and this DVD presents a 2 hour film of the project (on disc 1), as well as a TV series shown on Channel 4 (on disc 2) which looks more at the making of the album.

They talk to people including Stephen Fry, Noam Chomsky, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Sir Bob Geldof, Susan Sarandon and Billy Connolly. Musicians involved include Michael Stipe, Maxi Jazz, Stewart Copeland, Carlos Santana, Daniel Lanois, KD Lang, Zap Mama, Oumou Sangare and Will Young. They also work with different people around the world, including African tribal and Bedouin musicians, Chinese rappers, Gabonese Pygmies and Tuvan throat singers.

Video and Audio

On both discs there is an excellent 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, as first broadcast (in the case of the TV series on disc 2), and as good as you would expect. Nothing to complain about.

On disc 1, there's a DD5.1 soundtrack which is ok, but it doesn't set the world on fire. And that's due to the overall lack of music (more on that later).

On disc 2 there's a good DD2.0 soundtrack, which is as first broadcast, and again as good as you would expect.

Conclusion

This is a tricky one. The music (available on the CD/download release) is good. Some tracks are a bit too weird/"world music" for my taste, but some are really good. And watching disc 2 of this set, which is essentially the "making of" the album with some other boring bits added in, gives you more of an appreciation of the music and how everything comes together, and just who all the individual performers are. The first problem is with the "boring bits", since all the interview clips with people about life, love, death, families, men, women and whatever else just don't interest me.



Which is a massive problem when it comes to disc 1, since the film version of the project has more of that in. For a DVD released by musicians, there's not enough music here. At the very least I would have expected some form of promo for each of the tracks on the CD. There's enough footage to make the promos (they came back with over 1,000 hours of it).

I enjoyed watching the series on disc 2 since it gives you more of an appreciation of the music. If only there wasn't all that dull philosophical and opinionated stuff in there. So this DVD is worth watching to give you more insight into the music, but everything else was not to my taste. The music part was fascinating, the soapbox waffling was not. I suggest that you stick with the CD and you could even wait for the TV series to be repeated.