Every night, for the past two months, I have gone to bed with Joe Boyd. He wrote a book that’s more than 900 pages long — far too cumbersome to be read anyplace except on my pillow.
As it happens, it’s a terrific book, and I loved every minute of it. The title is: And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. Basically, this is a social and political tour, a history of the cultures that produced music we’ve come to associate with Jamaica, D.R. Congo, Brazil, Mexico, and dozens of other places around the globe whose artists have defined the concept of “world music.” The terminology is cumbersome, but the storytelling is not. It’s clear, and as engaging as any good history book, but this particular book explains, for example, how and why the likes of reggae, flamenco (see below), and the cha-cha are all part of a hyperlocal and a wonderfully global story. Happily, the story goes back a ways — back to the fifteenth century in some cases.
For example, you’re probably familiar with flamenco music, from Spain. Well, not exactly from Spain. Flamenco is more like gypsy music than Spanish music, but where’s the gypsy connection? And what, exactly, is a gypsy? The word gypsy derives from Egyptian, because that’s where these people sometimes claimed they had originated. But they didn’t. They came from India, but they often played on the streets, and saying they were Egyptian caused the people who were listening to give them more money. So, sure, they’re from Egypt. Or maybe they’re from Hungary — part of their story takes shape, there, too, which leads to Béla Bartók, and later, to world music star Márta Sebestyén. So, back to India: there were about 10,000 musicians imported from India to what becomes Pakistan, then dismissed when they were no longer wanted in Pakistan due to change of regime. So they traveled toward Europe, scattered, stayed close to one another, and continued to perform music for themselves and to earn the money they needed to stay alive. Later, when the king of Spain forbade the use of the term gitano in the late 18th century — the gitanos were gypsies — he determined that they were from Flanders, hence the term, flamenco. But that’s such a small part of the story, and music is only one aspect of the gypsy culture — if there even is a single gypsy culture because the people scattered to so many different places in Europe (and often seeded what is perceived to be music of specific local cultures).
The reason I love this book is simple. It’s not a linear history. Instead, it’s the grand story of interwoven cultures, places, peoples, instruments, political pressures against certain kinds of music (in many places, at various times in history, rulers prohibited the use of drums, for example). And so, the Rastafarians connect Ethiopia to Jamaica, and Cuba is connected to the Congo, Senegal and Ghana to England, and England to what was the empire.
In one chapter, we’re on the dance floor in the Latin jazz clubs of New York City, or in Cuba when Cuba was still an exciting place to visit and do things that might not be okay at home. In another, jazz saxophone player Stan Getz is making a record with João Gilberto, building a foundation that would solve a problem for middle-of-the-road singers as they tried to make their way through the 1960s. Traditionally, these singers relied upon songwriters we now associate with the great American songbook — Gershwin, Rogers & Hart, Rogers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter — but those sources had aged out, and they were replaced by rock musicians who wrote and performed their own material. The older singers needed a new source of fresh material — and found it in, of all places, Brazil. When Brazilian musician Sergio Mendez recorded a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, the likes of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra paid close attention. Jazz provided the bridge. And, of course, jazz was rooted in blues, and blues was rooted in music brought from Africa.
Joe Boyd is a wonderful storytelling, and a well-organized historian, but he is also a music producer who was often in the room where it happened — because he was the one who flew to Bulgaria or India, attended the performance of a magical artist with a spectacular local following, gained their trust, signed them, and got them into the studio to make records. Those backstage stories are fascinating because, more often than not, they take place in clubs and other venues in far away places with magic of their own.
You probably know at least some of the musicians in the book, but many others are likely to be new to you. Heck, I wrote a book (for Billboard Books) about world music CDs, and many of the names are now on my buy lists (yes, I still buy CDs). My sloppy list would certainly include Los Van Van, Ali Farka Touré (from Mali, in Africa, along with many other musicians from that vital country), Celia Cruz, Ravi Shankar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Fela Kuti, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Kanda Bongo Man — so many names, so much music that I want to hear again and again (much of my world music listening took place in the previous century!)
I should probably mention the many unlikely names in this book, too, because their stories provide a lot of valuable connective tissue, and lots of points of entry: Desi Arnaz, Igor Stravinsky, Dizzy Gillespie, Fidel Castro, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov…
This is not a book to read on a lazy weekend afternoon, but each (long) chapter is filled with a lovely combination of deep history and context. Taking it slow and easy is my recommendation. And, I would suggest you do something that I should have done — take notes. You will want to hear a lot of the music that the author discusses, but over nearly 1,000 pages, you will forget most of what you wanted to hear. Now, I find myself going page-by-page, constructing a proper list, finding some of the music on YouTube and some of it in my own collection, and, inevitably, buying more. It makes me very happy to buy a CD of ¡Cubanismo!, used, for $1.99, and to find out that there are concert videos on YouTube if I want to listen more, or listen for free.
That is: reading a very good book about music is not the end of the journey. It’s only the beginning.
Digital Insider 
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