R enowned 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 Seeger’s response.
Boyd’s record collection was a clue as to why: expansively arranged in alphabetical order by country, far and wide. India, Indonesia, Iran..
. 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 Boyd’s lifelong journey in pursuit of such music is this vast volume, every paragraph packed with information and inspiration – but written with a refreshingly light touch.
Inasmuch as music is an expression of the human world – our aspirations, tribulations and celebrations – this is a history of that world, told through music. And although music may derive from heritage, it is by definition “ sans frontières ”, and the book explores “how rhythms, scales, and melodies flowed across the globe, constantly altering what the world danced and listened to”. 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, “Afro-Cuban” m.