The 2012 album David Crosby crowned the greatest ever made: “Some of the best singing on Earth”
There’s never been limits on what any artist has to write. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, and sometimes, the biggest rock bands in the world will have an eclectic mix of tunes that they listen to behind the scenes to break things up every now and again.
Although David Crosby has always been proud to talk about his love of everything from folk to jazz, he knew he was listening to something unprecedented when hearing Music of Bulgaria by Phillip Koutev.
By the time Crosby got started with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, he was branching out much further than anyone else was willing to go. The supergroup could still harmonise together like a sun-soaked choir whenever performing ‘Woodstock’ or ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’, but Koutev was going after a completely different sound when putting together his project.
Released in the 1950s by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir under conductor Philip Koutev, the recordings introduced many Western listeners to the region’s striking close harmonies, unusual intervals and ancient vocal traditions. Their influence would later stretch far beyond folk music, inspiring artists working in rock, jazz and ambient music.
In fact, this could be considered the first real instance of world music starting to reach Western culture. Artists like George Harrison had already begun incorporating instruments like the sitar into the public consciousness, but listening to Music of Bulgaria is like hearing music from another galaxy half the time.
Sure, they have a different approach, but in between the musical anomalies, there’s a lot of raw beauty to be found in the project. Years before Paul Simon started putting together his own masterpieces on Graceland, this felt like meeting other cultures on their own terms and building the song around them rather than having them adapt to the traditional style that most people know.
Crosby’s fascination with unconventional harmony was hardly surprising. Throughout his career, he searched for new ways to weave voices together, often borrowing ideas from jazz and non-Western traditions to expand the harmonic vocabulary of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young beyond standard folk-rock arrangements.
For someone like Crosby, though, it always came down to how the vocals sounded. Outside of the melodic framework of the voices, their vocal lines sound so natural coming out of their mouths, as if they spent years refining them like instruments to create different inflexions reminiscent of Eastern instruments.
Despite being a part of one of the finest vocal groups in the world, Crosby still thought nothing could ever compare to what he heard out of Music of Bulgaria, recalling in 1998, “Music of Bulgaria, by Phillip Koutev and the Bulgarian National Folk Choir and Dance Ensemble, or Folk Choir and Orchestra, that’s it. And it’s probably one of the greatest records ever made. And very few people know it exists. The follow-up is good, but the original is mind-boggling. Some of the best singing that’s ever been done on the face of the earth.”
While most of Crosby’s generation tried to use rock and roll to achieve higher consciousness, this is probably the closest someone can come to actual hypnosis through song. Despite some of the artefacts being lost to time, the vocalists still carry on the tradition of what the original folk choir had done, which goes beyond any analysis.
This was music made for the heart rather than the mind, and considering most of the 1960s was about reinventing the concept of pop songs, the innovation was happening a few years earlier than they started. And considering the kind of harmonic movement happening across albums like Deja Vu, perhaps Crosby had a lot more influence from Koutev’s approach than he ever realised. Most artists can list out their favourite influences, but once listening to this, the melodies feel baked into your DNA.
For someone celebrated as one of rock’s greatest harmony singers, it is fitting that David Crosby’s highest praise was reserved for a choir operating in an entirely different musical tradition. Music of Bulgaria reminded him that the possibilities of the human voice were far greater than popular music often allowed, and that spirit of exploration became one of the defining characteristics of his own career.
