Joe Boyd is not a complete unknown. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan went electric, Boyd was behind the sound board. The next year, with the British Invasion still raging, he was in London as an A&R assistant for Elektra Records and running a club where Pink Floyd gigged. Boyd went on to produce albums for Chris Blackwell's Island and his own Hannibal label, moving from Nick Drake and Richard Thompson to an increasingly diverse set of Caribbean, Eastern European and African genres.
Connections among these and other musical traditions are the subject of Boyd's latest book, "And the Roots of Rhythm Remain" (Ze Books), now in paperback and on my desk as a bulky Chicago Public Library hardcover.
Boyd writes that the book's genesis was not similarity but contrast between the musical sensibilities of New Orleans and Havana, two traditions with African roots. Still, he seems to find direct links wherever he looks, and at 944 hardcover pages, not much escapes his gaze.
Three inches of ethnomusicology does not make a good beach read, but I've been known to take James Joyce to the lake, so why not? In my first summer as a radio DJ in decades, I'm catching up on a lot of music that escaped my notice in between. While following Boyd, many albums dropped into my crate.
Zulu groove thing
Paul Simon's "Graceland" makes a proper staring point. The album has become a symbol of appropriation, but Boyd notes that Simon's adept South African collaborators profited as well. (Notes from the album's anniversary release also brought out their understanding of Memphis R&B grooves.) Boyd pointedly notes that Ladysmith Black Mambazo was not a voice of the streets but the essence of Zulu establishment.
Then he reaches back to Simon's influences, the Weavers' "Wimoweh" and the Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and their origins in "Mbube," itself urban Johannesburg's 1938 take on provincial Natal falsetto. Each ingredient simmers in the pot. That's the recurring story of rock 70 years after Elvis Presley covered Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog," itself a Jerry Lieber-Mike Stoller confection. Along the way, Boyd sets me straight on Hugh Masakela's "Grazing in the Grass," so named for being recorded not with more cowbell, but in a marijuana haze.
Another theme Boyd follows across genres is ethnic music's dangerous honesty, which autocrats fear and cannot co-opt. While he has recorded artists such as Jesus Alemañy and Alfredo Rodríguez from London, his Afro-Cuban chapter relies on memoirs from producer Ned Sublette, promoter Bill Graham and performers in Havana, New York and elsewhere, plus a few travel aquaintances ("Fidel doesn't dance, not even one step," one Cuban tells him).
Blackwell brings Boyd closer to the action for his Jamaican chapter, in which Trenchtown reggae gangsters torch the island's respectable self-image. Boyd shows his tradecraft producing Toots and the Maytals' "Rastaman," swapping a trombone track with Toots Hibbard humming the part in rehearsal.
"For a while in the early seventies, I shared a house in the Hollywood Hills with John Cale," Boyd notes 30+ pages into his chapter on Hindu and Roma influences, backgrounding his interests in the classical connections to raga and rock. This dude was everywhere! So, we learn that Ravi Shankar productively collaborated as a performer with both George Harrison (who later plumbed Shankar archives to produce a box set) and as co-composer with Philip Glass (whose music publishing company shook loose royalties for obscure Shankar ragas).
Rebel rousers
In Boyd's telling, rhythm is often trapped in political crosscurrents. Jazz musicians on U.S. State Department-sponsored tours of Brazil bring bossa nova back with them; via the Incredible String Band, Boyd hears about Tropicália singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, whose disinterest in politics did not protect them from being jailed as provocateurs.
Boyd traces nominally white tango to its Argentine, Italian and African origins. Commissars alternately purge and sanitize Eastern European folk, while classical composers draw battle lines over whether to draw from peasant melodies. Boyd's world tour returns to Africa and Fela Kuta, whose home is raided in a local Lagos frenzy over sex, drugs and Afropop. Kuti then declares his compound the "Independent Kalakuta Republic," feeding the post-civil war regime's paranoia.
Roots music triumphs over racism, snobbery and religious purity across the globe; even American white minstrelsy withers and dies when Black entertainers join the circuit, performing in blackface. They energize vaudeville and popular performers of all races. A final chapter, "How we begin to remember," holds for an extra beat on world music, the bins in back of the record store bins where labels like Hannibal fight for space. The relabeled "global" genre artists always seem behind the times and less vital in their countries of origin, Boyd says.
Now, he wonders if drum machines and programmed beats are spreading too deeply into the countryside, thinning the ranks of live musicians. Boyd's fears do not seem well founded; Mississippi juke joints, Kingston DJs, Bronx MCs and Chicago house parties have not killed live music, only spread its joy. Indie "rock" now defies catagories; it's everything, everywhere, all at once. Whatever comes out of the speakers, the sound waves are real, our reactions are spectacular, and the roots of rhythm hold the reason.
