While the fluid nature of music does The world is a ghetto you feel relaxed and spontaneous, it is often meticulously constructed. On the set's bonus disc of alternate takes, the band work out different approaches to “The Cisco Kid,” the album's opening track, which rides over a chassis of conga, kick drum and bass. An attempt was rejected as sounding too much like “Shaft”, leading someone in the band to suggest calling their version “Shift”. The version that made the record is one of the definitive beats of the era. Jordan matches the groove with his keyboard, which goes through distortion, and picks out notes one by one. Together, it feels like a thousand little percussions that flow effortlessly in and out of each other, a small miracle of precision played with the pleasant vibrations of a few men jamming in the sea breeze at Bluff Park on Saturday afternoon.
“City, Country, City,” which was originally written for the 1973 film A name for evil, shows War at its most conceptually ambitious. As the title suggests, the song goes back and forth between a cowpoke country-gospel mode and a long funk jam played at highway speed. The former might be the album's best moment. It feels bathed in the glow of a great sunset, with Oskar playing a relaxed harmonica line over drums. When the band breaks out into more peaceful sections, Charles Miller's sax takes the lead. It doesn't match the beat of the rhythm section as much as smooth out their cut, gesturing toward overblown swell without ever quite getting there. It's a weird mix – it makes the song feel chubby around the edges and thin in the middle. one wonders what a more active sax player might have made of it.
While The world is a ghetto is a collective triumph, the personalities of the individual band members emerging more strongly than the jams collected on the bonus LP. While “LA Sunshine” would eventually find its way to 1977 Platinum Jazz in a dramatically different form, the embryonic version here is a showcase for Jordan's piano. In one flourish, he moves from an absurdly fast and mechanically precise salsa beat to a solo that weaves through R&B triplets, hammered chords that almost anticipate house music, and an eloquent string of notes that starts as Debussy and ends in the blues. Behind him, Dickerson's bass and Howard E. Scott's guitar chase each other around a palindrome of a riff, almost oblivious to the rest of the band. It's an incredible moment, more inventive and brilliant than anything that arrived on the last album. Jordan lets loose again on “Lee's Latin Jam” with a cascade of notes, while on “War Is Coming,” the whole band creates a hazy desert blues and basks in its heat.
The reissue package also includes three LPs of side tracks that stitch together various jams, work sessions and studio discussions into more or less coherent chronologies of how each of the original album's six songs came together. While it's interesting to watch the album evolve, and the production makes it surprisingly easy to tell each song's story, it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't already live deep within these grooves returning to them after a preliminary listen.
War was made unique by celebrating the many cultures that surrounded them – not synthesizing different inspirations into a perfect union so much as giving them all the same space to shine. The world is a ghetto is a landmark album of '70s funk, worthy of being remembered alongside the best work of the Meters, Parliament-Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone. The group's signature sound was amorphous, and the depth of their appeal is not as obvious as those bands. But the cohesive funk they forged, which reached its peak The world is a ghettoit's a personal and musical realization of the social harmony they've spent their careers fighting for.