Renowned music producer Joe Boyd was the first production manager to plug Bob Dylan into an electric guitar, at the Newport folk festival in 1965. He remembers Pete Seeger walking away in disgust. When I interviewed Boyd half a century later, he said, to my surprise, that he had come to understand Seegerâs response. Boydâs record collection was a clue as to why: expansively arranged in alphabetical order by country, far and wide. India, Indonesia, Iranâ¦
Having produced Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake etc, Boyd had turned his attention to music from over the horizon, derived from the rites and roots of those who make it. The culmination of Boydâs lifelong journey in pursuit of such music is this vast volume, every paragraph packed with information and inspiration â but written with a refreshingly light touch.
Inasmuch as music is an expression of the human world â our aspirations, tribulations and celebrations â this is a history of that world, told through music. And although music may derive from heritage, it is by definition âsans frontièresâ, and the book explores âhow rhythms, scales, and melodies flowed across the globe, constantly altering what the world danced and listened toâ. Especially across the Atlantic Middle Passage: a binding thread explains how much great music was created in defiance of the brutal horrors of colonialism and slavery.
After Cuba became the fulcrum of the colonised Americas, âAfro-Cubanâ music reverberated in all directions. The zaraband and chaconne, âbranded as lascivious âNegro importsâ when first heard in Sevilleâ, were âturned into polite templates suitable for Bach and Handelâ. Later, in New Orleans, âmultiple forces were coming together⦠to create the soundtrack to the first half of the western hemisphereâs 20th centuryâ. European innovations based on harmonic experiment were confronted by polyrhythms new to them, but centuries old in Africa. What Europe called syncopation had forever been an African âway of perceiving timeâ. Boydâs description of Dizzy Gillespie crossing that ârhythm chasmâ is electrifying.
An inventory of musical instruments in Brazil is âalmost as longâ as that of the 134 responses to a census of 1976 asking people to define their skin colour. When the tradition of Carnival (carne vale â farewell meat, for Lent) began in the 1890s, âBrazilian authorities tried to keep a lid on Africans joining in too exuberantlyâ. Likewise the generals, when it came to Tropicália music after the coup of 1964: Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were imprisoned, then fled to hang out in Notting Hill.
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There are âscales, melodies, rhythms, instruments and folk tales all swirling round in that mid-Atlantic gyre,â writes Boyd. He cites Nigerian wonder-drummer Tony Allen, after he heard bebop: âWe should have been playing⦠like that in Nigeria. After all, it originally came from here. They took it, went to the Americas, polished it, and sent it back to us in Africa.â âThe dialogue,â Boyd adds, âwas almost entirely between Africans and their long-lost cousins, whose ancestors had been taken in chains from these same lands. Their descendants had propelled and provoked the âdevelopedâ world into musical modernity; now it was Africaâs turn.â
Ravi Shankarâs music mastered Indian modal scales in which âthe sequence of notes used while ascending always differs from those on the way downâ and which are ânot limited to what western music calls whole or semitonesâ. When they reached New York, John Coltrane inflected My Favorite Things with Indian modes and his epic India was âbased on a Rajasthani folk melodyâ. Shankar captivated the west, met with George Harrison and Yehudi Menuhin, changing the lives of both, and music far beyond them.
A chapter exploring Russian and eastern European music finds Boyd at the Koprivshtitsa festival in Bulgaria: âa stunning spectacle: as far as I could see, there were woods and meadows filled with crowds in wildly colourful traditional garb. Eight stages were scattered across the plateau, each representing a different district.â But on Boydâs return to Koprivshtitsa after the fall of communism, âwedding bands played a hybrid of simplified Serbian and Thracian beats at a deafening volumeâ.
The disappointment cues an important theme in Boydâs thinking, post-Newport. Throughout the book, he is part of its story. And as writer and producer, he insists that music should be performed and heard with minimum technological conveyance. When producing the Bulgarian band Balkana, he convinces singers to gather around a single microphone, because âharmonies blend much better in the air than in a mixing boardâs transistorsâ. During the bookâs conclusion, meditating on how music informs memory, Boyd protests that âa computer-generated rhythm feels completely different from one created in real time by humansâ.
Music in Boydâs book is often a means of seduction, and at times sexual liberation from puritanism, mostly Protestant or Muslim. But carnal music, and music from the earth, also reach for the sublime: Boyd finds music expressing syncretism between religious beliefs â Afro-Cubans, Bahia Brazilians and slaves in the American south âfinding convenient parallels between Christian Saints and their own Godsâ, with effortless spirituality, but musical complexity.
Above all, this book is about music as deliverance from oppression. In South Africa, âwith all attempts to ameliorate the harshness of white rule thwarted, music became the expression of African anger, hope, misery and joy⦠singing became the weapon of choiceâ. Boyd cites Hugh Masekela: âThe government despised our joy.â Conversely, the USSR needed to destroy deep folk music precisely because it constituted peasant identity: âwood nymphs morphed into tractors⦠The Soviet solution was to drain every ounce of life out of musical forms they couldnât comprehend.â
One of Velosoâs jailers told him âhe considered the Tropicálistasâ deconstructions a far greater threat than any leftwing agitationâ. âExhibit A,â writes Boyd, âin the case for humanityâs resilience in the face of unimaginable horror, for its ability to create beauty in defiance of monstrosity, is the extraordinary sounds created by Congolese musicians even as their land was being plundered.â
Boydâs book is, accordingly, the Proust of music history â Ã la recherche of much music lost, here regained and affirmed in our present.