Producer and writer Joe Boyd started out managing Americana acts in the ’60s before moving to London where he went on to produce landmark albums for artists as diverse as Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band, Toots and the Maytals and Nick Drake. The label he launched in 1979, Hannibal Records, was at the vanguard of the world music era and released a spectacular catalog of titles. His acclaimed 2008 memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, recounted his early years as a producer. Since then, Boyd has been largely consumed writing a follow-up, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, the title, of course, taken from Paul Simon’s song “Under African Skies” from the legendary Graceland album. This book, like that album, is guaranteed to outlast us all. It’s an instant classic in the literature of music. All music.
The subtitle, “A Journey Through Global Music,” suggests that there could be other such journeys, and so there could. But at 857 pages (not counting notes, bibliography and index), Boyd’s journey is epic. In long, expansive chapters, he interweaves lively historical narratives, behind-the-scenes stories, and superb evocations of music. It’s a terrific read that never bogs down and offers surprises on every page, even for a fellow traveler like me. Boyd was recently in New York for a launch party that featured him in conversation with David Byrne. The next day, Sean Barlow and I sat down with the author to talk. The interview is rather long, but it barely hints at the richness in those 857 pages.
I began by noting that for all the ground covered in this expansive book, many places are left out. I wondered if his criteria for including musical destinations was based on personal passion, life experience or something else.
Joe Boyd: I would say the cultures that I cover in the book are determined not so much by my familiarity with them, but by the Western world's familiarity with them. The operating principle was: what's the music that everybody knows, but they don't know where it comes from, or the stories behind it? So it's samba, salsa, Balkan, Indian, flamenco... All these things that are the main musics from over the horizon that have arrived in front of most people in the Anglophone Western world, and how they have shaped our music, interacted with it, and been shaped by it. I would have loved to write a chapter about fado, or about Rembetica or Hawaiian music, Korean music... I mean that could have gone on forever.
So is there a Volume 2 coming?
No. Definitely not. The idea was, this is the stuff that you think you know, but I'm going to tell you more that you don't know, and let you peer behind the curtain of where this stuff comes from, and what are the political, social, and the personalities that have shaped it.
Well, you certainly accomplished that. Many of the stories you tell here parallel episodes we've produced for Afropop, whether it's the Black roots of Tango, the Cuba-Congo connection, African roots of the blues, or whatever. But in every case, I learned things from you that I did not know.
That’s great.
And I love the way you intersperse terse, compact, beautifully told summaries of history with the personalities. You are very good storyteller. This book has real narrative thrust, which is hard to do when you are covering so much territory. I wrote a piece for a magazine recently about taarab music in East Africa, and at one point, I described being at a concert. So the editor came back and asked, “Look, is this a historical article, or a personal account? Because it can't be both.”
Yes, it can.
Well, exactly. I immediately thought of your book and the way that you interweave your own experiences in this story, even though that's not what's driving your subject choices.
Well, I mean, I didn't set out with a plan for exactly how much of my own personal experience would be in the book, but whenever I was writing about something that I had experienced, and I felt that there was a memory or an experience that I'd had that was relevant, that would enlighten or show a different side of something, I included it. I didn't want to put in things just because: “Oh, I was there and I saw this.”
I guess two of the moments that come to mind immediately are going up the hill in Koprivshtitsa [Bulgaria] and seeing this huge meadow, just filled with thousands of people in traditional costume, seven stages of music, each one representing a different district of Bulgaria and wandering dazed from one to another, and then stumbling on these jam sessions in the groves of trees between the stages with professionals jamming with amateurs and Roma jamming with non-Roma Bulgarians. I just hope to get the reader into this. People who might not have any interest in Bulgarian music might be drawn in by my sense of wonder and enthusiasm about what I was experiencing.
The other one is a moment in Seville with my friend Mario Pacheco [producer of nuevo-flamenco albums]. We tried to go hear flamenco and we ended up in some tourist joint, and then we came back to the hotel and he went over to speak to the Gitano guy mopping the floor. He came away with an address and we went to the outskirts of town to a cement bunker that was the least picturesque place you could imagine, with boxing posters outside and big, chunky letters saying El Chocolaté and El Farruco, and then going in and having the most transcendent experience of that music and dance. I hope, the way I write about those experiences, those moments, will bring a reader into something they might not have been interested in beforehand.
Those first-hand experiences do jump off the page. I found myself curious about all sorts of things. I often put the book down and went to YouTube to hear the music you were describing. You know, when you were releasing Hannibal albums in the 80s and 90s, I was writing for the Boston Phoenix. It was the beginning of the “world music” rush in the U.S.. Labels were releasing things that music editors didn’t know what to do with, and I became the go-to guy for all of it. So in addition to the African music that I was actually learning about, I was getting Eastern European wedding music, Irish records, all sorts of things, including albums you produced. Reading about them here got me curious all over again. I still have all those CDs, by the way. I don't throw anything out.
But coming back to your mission, you are writing about music that goes from being local to, in some way, global. It breaks out of its place and becomes something else in the hands of outsiders. You cite a wonderful observation by the musician/archivist/writer and scholar John Collins in Ghana. You’re talking about African pop artists of the ‘90s like Youssou N’Dour or Papa Wemba who developed two different presentations, their traditional sound for back home, and a more fused, modern sound for the West. John Collins thinks they got it backwards, that in fact, the two audiences would have preferred it the other way around.
There's a lot of evidence for that, and that's one of the things I found fascinating about that period, I guess you could say from about 1985 to 1990. The so-called “world music audience,” mostly white middle-class listeners in northern Europe and North America, were enjoying the same kind of music that people were dancing to in a lot of parts of Africa and the rest of the world. I took Ivo Papasov to places and people were jumping up and down and dancing. They weren't doing it as well as people in the Thracian Valley in Bulgaria, but they got the same buzz. They got the same thrill, and the music was exactly what was played in Bulgaria. But then, the coming of the drum machine led many cultures down a different road.
Modernity is a very interesting word for me and one I come back to in the book. Before the 19th century, in Latin and North America, you really could sense that “modernity” was either defined by how Black it became or how Roma it became. Liszt changed the face of classical music with his flamboyant performances, which he learned from the Roma. He got that attitude and that whole idea of decoration and flamboyance from János Bihari and people like that. And you know, music in Cuba and Argentina and Brazil all became more modern when it became more Black, when they hired slaves to play music. Initially, they were expected to play like Europeans. But of course, they would always alter it and change it. And the more they changed it, the more “modern” it became. And for most of Europe now, “How Much is that Doggy in the Window” and that stuff in the ‘40s and ‘50s, was over with rock and roll, which is basically the capture of the main avenues of popular music in America by rhythm and blues or rhythm and blues-inflected music.
And so this progression continues until it stops with the world music scene where you have developed a whole audience that really loved acoustic virtuosity and the traditions that had been lost, or at least sidelined, in American music. Now people were looking for it, and finding it, all over Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Meanwhile, those cultures kept moving and becoming more modern by using technology and drum machines. And that pulls the rug out from under a lot of this stuff that the West was enjoying so much, because it lost that virtuosity, that feeling of spontaneous creation. They tried to hang on to it by all this fusion, by putting a kora player with a Norwegian fiddler and this kind of thing, desperately trying to come up with novelties to expand people's idea of what music around the world could be.
But there was that golden era, that moment, five years or so when the greatest artists from around the world were still playing their traditional way, and the West grabbed hold of them, invited them to festivals and concert series—just wonderful concerts, wonderful moments. But across the 90s I feel it began to decline as the music changed. The whole landscape changed, and now it's a very different scene. You would have to write quite a different book about what is happening now.
Last night when you were speaking with David Byrne, you touched on sensitivities around the idea of cultural appropriation. You both seemed to be saying that music has always been about appropriating, listening to something that some individual or some neighboring group, and, particularly in the age of recordings, adapting and changing it. There's endless cross-fertilization, and always has been. I'm interested in that moment when experimentation crystallizes, and suddenly you have “a genre.” We can talk about all the things that led up to reggae, but once it got there, it was something that would last.
Well, I think it's the history of almost any genre of music. It almost always starts with imitation, you know, British art students trying to play Mississippi Delta Blues and it becomes the rock revolution at a certain point. The Beatles went from being a bar band that played covers of R&B to writing “Elleanor Rigby.” You find this all over the world. The shining example, which you will be familiar with, is the GV series of Cuban discs that were distributed across Africa by HMV Records starting in the late ‘30s, and how impactful they were.
Africans gobbled them up, particularly in Congo. They heard in it something that they recognized as their own, because a lot of that feeling came from the fact that all those slaves had been taken to the New World from the coastline of Angola and Congo. So they felt that connection; they felt that it was their tradition. It sounded cool. It sounded big. It sounded modern. And so they wanted to make their music like this Cuban stuff and so the early records of Congo are pretty much rumba.
Technically, the sound the Congolese imitated was mostly son, the sound from Oriente in Cuba, but I take your point.
So little by little, the music became something else, particularly when Franco came along with his much more rooted, traditional way of playing his guitar. He was not so interested in trying to sound like a trés or a trumpet. But they created something that then, in turn, spread all across Africa with independence, and with the Bantous de la Capital [from Brazzaville] performing at the parties for the first day of independence in Douala and Abidjan and Bamako and in Conakry and wherever, providing a template for the future of each of these individual country’s and culture’s music. Each one of them was then trying to copy the Congo and create something different. And to me, that's the way music works everywhere.
The issue, though, which is worth addressing, and is maybe at the crux of the use of the word “appropriation,” is this. When Vampire Weekend cops a couple of licks from a Congolese rumba record, and Fela Kuti cops licks from James Brown, is there a difference? Does the fact that Vampire Weekend are privileged white kids from New York and come from a culture with the money to buy and sell everybody in the Congo twice over, and Fela Kuti comes from a poor country like Nigeria and appropriates a James Brown guitar riff, is there something different and more justified? And the other one is less justified? Is there a moral difference between them?
If you're just listening to the records, you could say, “Well, no. One sound is simply influencing the other.” But I can understand people saying that the context is different, and that you can't really look at the two things quite the same way. I do understand that, although I'm not sure I would ultimately agree, because I think these things happen at the level of individuals, people, you know, one man listening to a record and getting an idea, picking up his guitar and playing it a certain way. It isn't really tectonic, sociopolitical, geopolitical plates shifting. It happens at the level of individuals and every story is different. That's what I hope to show in the book, that these stories are as individual as the people.
I agree. From the artist’s point of view, I think taking influence is always valid, especially when it’s acknowledged. Money, of course complicates the picture, but that’s another discussion.
Coming back to Congolese music, that crystallization that happened with Franco in the period right after him is still present, despite all the subsequent changes in Congo music. We've just been going to Dar es Salaam the last couple of years, and there are great bands there that sound very much like OK Jazz, except they're singing in Kiswahili. They're terrific. They've got the horns. They've got the dancers. They've got young guys playing with old guys. There's one band that's been around under various names continuously since 1964.
It's great to hear that.
There's a lot that goes on in Africa that doesn't get out. Let’s talk a bit about music and politics. Recently, I’ve been working with musician and UC Irvine professor, Mark Levine—you might know him from a book he wrote in 2008 called Heavy Metal Islam. Mark has this concept of what he refers to as “the funk belt,” and the idea is to tell the story of how funk music came from America and swept across the middle of the continent from Gerardo Pino in Sierra Leone, through Nigeria and Fela, all the way to the Ethiopia and Sudan. It’s partly a story about a musical aesthetic, but also about the political messages that came with funk, basically a message of rebellion.
To me, maybe the most interesting part comes when we get to the Congo. Apparently, President Mobutu particularly disliked funk music and understood its political associations. As we know, he famously restricted foreign music on the Zairean [Congolese] airwaves, thus creating a vital incubation period for Congolese music. But it wasn’t just about style for him. It was also a fear of the music’s rebellious spirit.
Well, that story you tell me is repeated a lot around the world. I didn't know the details you just told me about funk specifically, but I wrote in my comparison of Mobutu and Franco, that they both were hostile to the evolués and the people who wanted to modernize the Congo. They wanted to hold it back and keep it traditional, with a traditional big man, which of course would be Franco or Mobutu.
You can compare that to what was happening in South Africa with the battle between Inkatha and the ANC. One of the things that triggered this book in the first place was my watching all these Western consumers gobbling up South African Zulu music and thinking that in so doing they were supporting Mandela, not realizing that most of the younger ANC guys who were fighting in the streets loved funk and disco and anything with English lyrics, and they were quite hostile to African language music, particularly Zulu language, because they found it backwards. Meanwhile, Inkatha was cutting deals with the government. The government kept promising the Zulus a much more independent Zululand if they would collaborate with them to defeat Mandela, and that battle was musical as well as political.
In the Soviet Union you have this fierce battle to suppress the “old-fashioned” music, because the communist revolution was an urban workers’ revolution. People in the countryside wanted no part of collectivization, and Stalin felt that you had to crush rural traditional culture in order to change it and make it part of the brave new world of Soviet communism. So women singing in an open throat voice, standing next to somebody and getting their harmony from the overtone, you know, was just anathema. They hated it, and they tried to force the Moiseyev Ensemble down the throats of everybody.
This issue of tradition versus modernity, and foreign influence, that issue spreads itself in so many directions. Take the Palladium in New York, just a few miles from here. When they started running dances at the Palladium, the mafia controlled the location, and the Irish policemen were the ones patrolling the streets. They hated the idea of all these Black people, Black Latins and Black African Americans, coming into Times Square at night. And the promoter at the Palladium said, “Hey guys, if you want the green, you got to have the black.” He had to bribe his way into creating this culture of the Palladium, which was so mixed and so revolutionary and so challenging to many political and social prejudices. You find these stories everywhere you turn. Music doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Coming back to Europe, I loved your writing about Bartok and Liszt. I knew that Bartok used folk music, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. You really unwind that story beautifully, revealing all these complex attitudes toward folklore and tradition. And then we get to the Soviets redesigning traditional instruments to play Western classical music in Central Asia.
Yes. Mark Slobin wrote about that in his book Retuning Culture.
I actually had Mark as a professor when I was an undergrad at Wesleyan University in the ‘70s, and I remember being blown away by that idea.
The power of music! It's a mysteriously powerful thing.
I love one quote you have near the end of the book by Gustave Mahler, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” A lot to chew on there
But let’s come back to your story. Why did you call your record label Hannibal Records?
Well, the answer has two parts. When I was a kid, I was always a history buff. And I was fascinated by the Carthaginian wars and by the Carthaginian general Hannibal, taking all these elephants up through Spain and through Provence and into Switzerland over the Alps and down into Italy, and kicking Roman butt for years before suddenly being defeated and losing it all. I'm kind of a sucker for underdogs, and I love the fact that this guy was just running rampant through the Roman Empire, capturing huge swaths of the Italian peninsula and scaring the wits out of the Romans.
So that was somewhere in the back of my head. But flash forward 20 years and I've got a deal with Chris Blackwell to start a label. We've set up an office and I've hired an assistant and I've started talking about deals with groups. I've heard Defunkt and I've talked to the McGarrigles about their records and kind of set the breadth of what we’re trying to do here. And I didn't have a name. I was desperate for a name.
I had heard there was a scene in L.A. that was quite active. A lot of interesting new bands. So I thought, “Let me go out to L.A. and see what's going on there.” I got in touch with this girl who I'd met behind the counter of a Licorice Pizza store. And she had guided me to different reggae re-releases and I don't know. She was, you know, born with vinyl under her fingernails. She later became a big executive at Geffen Records. But at this time, she was just working behind counters at record stores. So I called her up and said, “Can you show me around? Can you take me to the different clubs and show me what's what?” Anyway, she was a she was a great help. And the day I left, I took her to lunch at Musso and Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard to thank her, and I told her that I was looking for a name for the label.
We had a very nice lunch. And then I said, “Oh my God, I got to run.” I got up and paid the check. She was just finishing her coffee. And I was just at the door out of Musso and Frank's and she yelled across the room, “You should call your label Hannibal.” And I stood there in the doorway and said, she's right. I should. I will. There were phone booths in the lobby of Musso's, and I went right into one, put a dime in and called my brother, the lawyer, and said, “Register the name Hannibal Records.” Then I hung up and I went to the airport.
Then years later, when she was an executive at Geffen, I ran into her at South by Southwest and I said, “Why did you say that? Why did you tell me Hannibal?” She said, “Oh, I have a cat called Hannibal.”
So your label was named after a Carthaginian general and an L.A. cat, although your Hannibal did not turn out to have nine lives.
No. But I did think of Hannibal and the Carthaginians. I was hoping to rampage across the musical landscape that was governed by CBS and Warner Music and Universal and I would capture cities here and there and cause havoc. That was my image of the label. Didn't quite work out that way…
But you certainly had some great moments. Toumani Diabatés debut solo album Kaira comes to mind. And of course, our paths crossed in 1993 when we [Afropop Worldwide] collaborated on Kanda Bongo Man’s Soukous in Central Park. Sean always recalls you coming into the studio during the mix and saying, “Turn up the guitars!” I think especially the rhythm guitar, so you could distinguish what each was playing.
Yes. To me that whole soukous guitar thing depends on having the three guitars almost equal so the overtones chime against each other and they vibrate and bounce off each other and without with one guitar up here and two more down here. It's just not the same thing. It’s a different sound.
I agree, and most of the Congolese albums were mixed with the lead way on top. But I think a lot of the East African groups who adapted Congo rumba did it differently. Styles like benga in Kenya or sungura in Zimbabwe downplay or even completely lose the clave, but make the guitars more equal, so they’re just dancing with each other in counterpoint.
So when mbiras play together, can you say one is more?
It is harder to tell there, partly because they sound so similar and also because each individual part is quite complex. But to the extent that one dominates, I think it has more to do with the players themselves than with any choices made by sound engineers.
Moving on, in addition to the deep history and great stories in this book, there are some fascinating facts that I had either forgotten about or never knew. I’m going to run through a few of them. You were just talking about the Palladium. I did not realize that so many Puerto Ricans came to New York after World War I because they had been recruited to fight and that part of the deal was that they would then get U.S. passports.
Not just the people recruited to fight, but all Puerto Ricans. The Jones Act basically made citizens of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico American citizens. And so anyone, whether you'd fought in the trenches of Flanders or whether you were just a 15-year-old kid, you could migrate to America, so many did, and it changed music.
Sure did. That's fascinating. I also liked that the word “juju” comes from the rubbing of the tambourine skin. I never knew that. And then the fact that Argentine tango legend Carlos Gardell had a fight with Che Guevara's dad.
That was an interesting one. He was wounded. He got a gunshot wound, you know. I just love the idea of Che Guevara's dad and Carlos Gardel fighting over a woman in Buenos Aires bar. You can't make that up.
And then Astor Piazzolla nearly dying with Gardel because his father wouldn’t let him go on that fateful concert trip. I think I've read that before, but it was nice to be reminded. But the one that really hurt was the Congolese band African Fiesta playing at Expo 67. My family had just moved to Montreal then and we went to Expo 67 regularly. Of course, at 11 years old, I had no clue, but to realize I was that close… And finally, you cite this wonderful list of English words that come from the Wolof language of Senegal: dig, jive, hip, cat. More Africanisms in American languge that we don't recognize.
Yes, and it’s not just language, but so many skills. These pasty English people on the coast of Carolina and Virginia trying to survive. I mean, this is a whole other book that I don't have the expertise to write, but there are so many examples throughout the Americas of slaves saying, “Excuse me. This is how you do that right. This is a plant that will grow in this kind climate. This is how you trap that kind of animal…” I mean who knows how many would have survived if it wasn't for African knowledge and African expertise?
There is in fact a wonderful book about that, African Founders, by David Hackett Fischer. It goes region by region around the United States, and tells very specific stories about African and African-American people who excelled in various ways largely overlooked by history. The stories about the Black cowboys in the West, going back to small Fulani boys learning to confront and control huge animals, is one great example. But coming back to music, do you think the whole “world music” phenomenon that we have lived through has had the side benefit of promoting more awareness of the world’s complexities and history?
Well, I'd like to think that. I mean, it feels like it didn't happen fast enough. But it's certainly happening. Think of the internet, the fact that you can see clips of people's lives from all across the world on your iPhone. There are lots of reasons why the world has gotten smaller and why the objections of people who don't like that have grown more determined and violent. Music, I think, is definitely part of that, but I wouldn't be confident in giving it a primary role.
The other night, you and David [Byrne] were talking about a book I did not know, Noise Uprising by Michael Denning. As I heard you two, Denning has a theory about how recording technology actually changed people's political mentality. The idea was that people hearing for the first time their own music, playing back to them next to the famous artists they were listening to on records, inspired and empowered subjugated people, and ultimately encouraged them to reclaim their countries from colonial masters. I’m sure I’ve oversimplified the premise, but that was the gist of it, right?
Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think of an example of a revolution… There’s the Hungarian story of the dance-house (táncház) movement. I mean, obviously the Berlin Wall fell for a lot of reasons, but the surge that started the process began in Hungary. In Hungary, you had this compromise deal after the ‘56 uprising, which gave people a lot more leeway than in some of the other Eastern European countries. And I think the dance-house movement focused this energy of like, “This is what communism isn't. This is free, this is sexy, this is individualistic.” It was also collective, but not collective from the top down, but collective from the bottom up. Groups of people formed associations to dance in a circle, to dance beautifully, to learn something difficult. It challenged a very fundamental issue about socialism and communism. There's this hostility in many communist movements to excellence. If you recognize excellence, that person A is so-so at a job, and person B is a little better, and person C is actually great at this job, you've unnerved something basic in this idea where everybody has to be the same.
On the same level, you see the way Soviet communism went through Central Asia and other places, basically executing the best—anybody who stood out, who was great. They wanted folk music to be something simple, something everybody could do easily, songs everybody could sing together. And the dance-house movement said, “No, this isn't simple. This is really hard, and you’ve got to come every night for three months and have lessons in order to get any good at it.”
Those melodies aren't simple. They're full of complicated decorations, and if you're going to sing them, you’ve got to sing them the way they sing them in the villages in Transylvania, and that's not easy. So this whole idea challenged much of the communist notion of how society would be run. And in Hungary, dance-house was one of the key elements in making the country a weak brick in the wall of Eastern Europe.
There’s a book out now called The Picnic. It’s about a big picnic of East Germans on holiday in Hungary who decide to go and present themselves at the border going into Austria and say, “We're leaving,” and the Hungarians say okay, and that was the beginning. That was what led to the fall of the wall, the first hole in the dike.
That is fascinating. As you know, we recently lost our mutual friend, Toumani Diabaté. I want to take you back to the one time that you and I actually spent time together, which was during the recording of the Kulanjan album with Toumani, Taj Mahal and an amazing collection of Malian musicians. I was lucky enough to be there as a journalist, who actually wound up playing guitar on the title track. But I remember that there was that time when Taj had to go away for a day or so to play a gig in Cleveland, and the Malians recorded another album of their own.
We're trying to get it released. Chrysalis owns it now. At least I think they do. They bought all the masters of Toumani’s, but there are murky legal stings and it's just like pushing a bolder uphill to get the major labels’ legal departments to actually clarify positions and negotiate a deal. It's just a soul-destroyer.
Particularly considering how spontaneously that recording happened. As I recall it wasn't planned at all.
No, no. I thought everybody would have a day off, but they all said, “We don't want a day off. Let's just play music.” And Jerry [Boys, the engineer] was up for it, so it happened. It's a lovely record. Kasse Mady [Diabaté] just sounds so good.
When you look back on the Kulanjan record, how do you see its place in this story?
Well, as I say in the book, the idea that you can trace the roots of the blues to the Sahel… Have you ever heard of Gerhard Kubik?
Yes. We did a show called Africa and the Blues with him. Fascinating man. Quite opinionated.
I like him. I mean, I've never met him, but I've read two of his books, Africa and the Blues and Jazz in Africa. His point is if you're looking at the source of something that started in the 17th century or the 16th century even, and you're looking at the way things sound today in an age when people have listened to John Lee Hooker records in Mali, and Tinariwen used to travel around the desert playing Dire Straits cassettes, you're not going to get a clear, academically defensible picture. But still, I think there are clear links. We know so many ancestors of African Americans were captured in the Sahel.
Yes, particularly during the Bambara wars when many captured there and sent to the coastal slave ports.
The music is different from the coast, and different from Congo and Angola. One of the things I hope to accomplish with my book is to reinforce something that is obvious. I think a lot of Americans in particular, and Europeans, don't really see nuances. A Black African is a Black African, you know. In fact, it's like comparing a Lapp to a Sicilian. There are such differences in the cultures. But I think there's clearly something in the scales and just that whole culture of stringed instruments, singing vocal histories, griots, audience responses, listeners responding, you know; it's a vocal culture. And it got transported to a land that forbade drums. They didn't have that many drums anyway coming from the Sahel where there are few trees. And stringed instruments, you know, the ngoni became the banjo, and, you know, it's very tempting to make these connections, and clearly there’s a lot of truth in it. But I digress.
Right. Kulanjan.
In a way, we were being a bit simplistic about it, Taj and the Malians. Let's get to the roots of connection between the Malians and the blues. But it was not an academic exercise; it was a marketing exercise, or a high-concept idea for an album that Taj had always wanted to make. So as an A&R man, you say, “Great idea. Let's do it.” But it wasn't scientific the way we went about choosing the repertoire.
My favorite moment in that project, which I can't say proves anything, but was kind of fascinating, was when we said to Taj, “Just sing without your guitar.” Because the way we would get the Malians to collaborate with Taj was that they would play a song and he would try and think of a blues that was rhythmically or melodically similar so that they could kind of blend the two things together, like “Queen Bee.” So Taj always had his guitar in his hand, and I was very conscious of the fact that the guitar has a rhythmic effect on whatever it takes part in. It kind of brings things to a certain place rhythmically. And so at one point, when we were looking for the next tune to do, I said, “Taj, put away your guitar for a change. Just sing a song without the guitar. Preferably, the oldest one you can think of, a 19th century African -American song.”
Taj is encyclopedic; he knows a lot. So let the Malians come up with the rhythm that accompanies it. Let’s say, “If you heard this song in Bamako, how would you accompany it?” And so he sang “Ol’ George Buck.” And that's one of my favorite tracks on the album.
Me too. And it's funny because I didn't know that song before then, and I also loved what they did with it. But since then I've heard much older versions of it, and they're all very different.
The Malians hadn't heard those. And they were just doing a Malian version of it. No, it doesn't prove anything. But it's great.
I always liked the metaphor of twins separated at birth and then reconnecting later. When we interviewed Kubik about all this, he was skeptical about claims that the blues came from West Africa. And yet, after all his detailed research, comparing 100 different musical qualities in various recordings--he was very thorough about it—he basically comes to the conclusion that we could have started with: it has origins in the Sahel.
That's what I say in the book. He debunks all these theories, but in the end he says, “Well, actually…”
I always thought that the way Malians, whether it's the Tuaregs or the Bambara blues guys, so readily adapted electric guitar and rock and blues was a clear indicator of something. It’s exactly parallel to what you describe with the Cuban music and the Congolese. They hear themselves in it, so they re-appropriate it and change it.
Yes. And Kubik makes that very point in his blues book.
There’s an oft-told story about how the term “world music” was invented in a London pub in the mid-80s. But we always have to point out that Sean and I went to Wesleyan University where they had the World Music Hall, built in the ‘60s. Of course, the point of that story is not so much that they “invented” the term. It was that they chose it as their marketing hook. Our mutual friend John Collins was at that meeting, and he was not happy with the outcome. He once told me that there was starting to be a real coalescence around the concept of Black Music, whether it was from the Caribbean, or the U.S., or Africa. There were all these U.K. DJs who were working the scene, playing James Brown next to Fela, just mixing it all up, because it was all related to this Black dissemination of music out of Africa.
So once you called it world music, everything was thrown into the pot. So then two things happened, according to John. One, a lot of these DJs had a harder time getting work, because they were expected to also play Balkan wedding music and whatever. And also, this choice opened the door to a lot of charlatans who didn't really know much about anything, but could read a press release and write an article. I took this to heart, because at the time I was that person, writing for the Boston Phoenix and being barraged with music from everywhere.
I totally understand John’s point, and certainly one of the strongest objections to the term was from people involved with African music, who felt that somehow Balkan music and Scandinavian music and tango and things like that were tagging along, riding on the coattails of African music. And, you know, fair enough. But the fact remained that what the term mostly refers to is a customer base, a market base. And that was brutally simple. Many people who would go looking for an Orchestra Baobab record would be the most likely customers for a new Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan record and would be the most likely customers for the Lila Downs record because there was that mentality that this was a new field, a new area of music to explore.
A lot of the labels that were at that meeting thought this way. Globestyle put out a lot of African music, but they also put out a lot of stuff that wasn't African, and the same with Luaka Bop. It was only much later that you got things like Awesome Tapes from Africa and Analog Africa, these labels are specialized in African music.
So if the label was desperate to get space in record stores, this mattered. We had ten inches of vinyl in the back corner, and if we could get from 10 inches to 30 inches, that was a big advance. And the labels involved in funding this were quite Catholic. They had African music, Latin American music, Eastern European music… They had this mix.
I recognize that there was the possibility of this DJ-led or dance floor-led Black music movement that might have done better if the world music thing hadn't happened, but you can also understand why it made sense at the time.
Sean Barlow: Joe, we've been tilling the same fields for decades now, and I'm interested in the potential and the actualization of creating, producing, distributing music cross -generationally. As we know now, the biggest globally booming African music is Afrobeats, primarily out of Nigeria and amapiano out of the South Africa. Burna Boy, probably the biggest star in Afrobeats, sold out Madison Square Garden to 22,000 people. Ticket prices were $300, $400. The audience was primarily diaspora kids, the kids of immigrants coming to America. And who did he have opening his concert but Youssou N’Dour, singing a cappella for Africa? He sang “New Africa,” and then joined the band for the opener, “Level Up.”
And then Burna Boy’s band was great. He had like four talking drummers, a 15-piece band. But I’m curious to hear your take on the opportunity for cross-generational appreciation, in other words, for having the older Afropop fans get into the younger music and having the younger Afrobeats fans kind of getting turned on to the veterans, the classic styles.
I have to say I'm a bit hesitant to answer that question because the truth is I've been very focused on writing this book. I have not kept up. You know, I had to draw a line. If I'd if every time something new happened some new star emerged or some new trend, I had to change my line of writing, I would have never finished the book. I had to draw a line, and the line was connected to the theme of the book. The line is the drum machine. I'm not saying that the drum machine is evil or bad or whatever. It's just different. It's something different and The Roots of Rhythm Remain is about rhythm that people create in a moment together. It's communal. I had to focus so much to finish this book that I cannot say that I am super attuned.
I've heard Burna Boy. I've watched his Tiny Desk concert, which I thought was very good. And I've heard some very interesting stuff, but mostly what I hear is so clearly click-driven or machine-driven it just enters my brain differently. It's not what I'm writing the book about, and I realize that that may consign my book to the realm of a history book rather than something that's about the music of today. But you know, I had to make that choice and I've tried to make it so relevant and so interesting and so lively that it's enjoyable for people who might have only discovered the music in the last five or ten years. But I would be very hesitant to pontificate on the subject of modern African music, or modern music from anywhere. But it's fantastic that records produced in Africa zipped around the world at the speed of light and can now get two million hits.
And look at the kind of money the top artists are making. Most of the artists we knew couldn't have imagined that.
Exactly. Ant I think it's great, but I don't know enough about the nuances of it and where it's going and who the key figures are
That's why we at Afropop are looking for young people to take over, because the flood of new sounds is overwhelming. Alright, we're almost done here. A couple of smalll things. You lament that Tony Allen never got to make a real jazz record, but what about the Art Blakey record he made? Have you heard that?
I haven't heard that. Who's playing on it?
It’s a tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I don’t know the players, but the names look European.
Well, that could possibly go into our errata.
Here’s another one. And I wonder if Lucy Duràn caught this. You said most koras now have brass tuning pegs yet, but not yet. Most of them are still doing the leather thongs you have to manipulate with your thumbs.
Okay, here's what Lucy said to me about that. I'm interested in your comments on this. She challenged my description of Toumani during a song I recorded when I say that Toumani would have to re-tune his kora using a small hammer. I have a vivid memory of having to stop the recording because the kora had drifted out of tune. And Toumani getting out a very small hammer and using his fingers and the hammer and knocking the leather thong up ever so slightly to tune the thing. Lucy said, “No, no, no, a kora player would never use a hammer. They would use their thumbs.” But what can I say? That's my memory.
Well, I have nothing to add on that. Maybe he was experimenting? Based on an earlier conversation, I know that you and I have different evaluations of Papa Wemba. I’m a huge fan. You, not so much. And when you write about Youssou N’Dour’s post-European-discovery period, I mostly agree that the earlier stuff was more interesting. Still, I do like the albums Set and Joko more than the others of that era. But that's just me. We recently re-aired a concert that we recorded in New York in 1989, Youssou N’Dour at the Ritz. It was the time of the album Gaiende, The Lion, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the live performances are much more exciting than the tracks on that record.
Finally, a little update about tsapiky music from southwest Madagascar. Right at the end of this enormous book, I was happy to learn that you were a fan of tsapiky, that you went to Tulear and even considered doing a production. It turned out that this was near the end of Hannibal, and that wasn’t feasible. But your writing suggests that tsapiky is a genre that kind of came and went. Well, I'm happy to report that tsapiky is alive and kicking. Check out our recent podcast, Women of Tsapiky and you’ll see what I mean.
Good to hear.
So, to end, Joe, it seems to me that the period of time you describe in this book is unique and unrepeatable, that the confluence of history, technology, political change and just everything that was happening created a particular world of possibilities. Now that global cultures are so connected and intermeshed, the world feels fundamentally different. That's my sense of things, anyway. I wonder if you have any concluding thought about that.
I do think that's probably the case, and it has as much to do with technology as anything. The arrival of electrical recording in 1925 was huge. It changed so much about the way cultures interacted and how music was experienced. And it had this feedback loop on live performance, because now you could hear a singer vividly above a big orchestra and you could hear the words, and hear the personality on the recording. Inevitably, you're going to start having PA systems and you're going to start having that kind of sound in the dance hall. And then, along comes the electric guitar and changes everything. In my time as a producer, I went from the very first recordings I made on tape that was quarter-inch mono, and then quarter-inch stereo, then half-inch four-track, and then one-inch eight-track, two-inch sixteen-track. If you're going to be, you know, a doom merchant, you might say that going from two-inch sixteen-track to two-inch twenty-four-track was the slippery slope at the beginning of the decline. Because you're squeezing fifty percent more tracks into the same space. So you lose the bottom end. The sound of the bass recorded on a sixteen-track two-inch is very different from the sound of a bass recorded on a twenty-four-track two-inch. And so everything started to change.
Musicians have a vision of their music in their head, which is perfect. And if you give them the opportunity to make it perfect, they will take that opportunity, even if it makes the music less powerful or less full of feeling. So that has changed. The recording process has changed.
The demographics, the way people listen and experience music, have also changed. But this book is not a prophecy. It's just a report on this period that, as you describe, may be unrepeatable. But I think ultimately it's important. I love history. And I think it's essential that people learn from history and for people to understand where things came from. You describe bands in Dar es Salaam that are playing the old-fashioned way, and there are going to be other examples of that. There will be revivals here and there, and maybe some will be pathetic, like the Dixieland revival in the 1940s. Or maybe some will be fantastic. Who knows?
In the book Dmitri Pokrovsky says he realizes that there is absolutely no chance that you could really revive open-throat singing. You would have to transform rural life in Russia, and there is no way that will happen. But he wants to create an alternative so that people have the knowledge and the skills and the information about how to make this kind of music, how it works. And so people have the choice, and some people will want to choose that way of doing it. In a similar way, this book will provide an alternative, a way of looking at the way music was made during this great period, which has not died as fast as some predicted. When you go to the very few record stores that exist, the box sets that are piled by the cash register are mostly from the ‘60s and ‘70s, even the ‘50s. There aren't many figures from the ‘90s that have endured as iconic figures like the Who and the Stones and the Beatles. And the same thing with classic music from around the world. Ravi Shankar records are still revered and bought.
Case in point. Real World just released another Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album, from the vault.
There you go. I hope my book might trigger a few reissues of its own.
I hope so. Well, it's really great to talk with you. You produced pop records that Sean and I grew up with as teenagers. And the Hannibal albums are a fine legacy on their own. And now, you've made an enormous contribution to the literature and the memory. I don't know how you convinced the publisher to let you make it so long.
They were just very supportive, and I can't praise them enough, and Zee Books, the American publisher, who just went with it. I've been very, very fortunate in my publishers, and in the reaction I've gotten and the support I've gotten from people in the business.
Well deserved. Thank you and congratulations.
Thank you for that, and for all your work.
