Ian Brennan is a hugely successful producer whose work has often graced the pages of Songlines. He’s produced albums by the likes of Ustad Saami, Zomba Prison Project, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Malawi Mouse Boys, The Good Ones, Sainkho Namtchylak and Tinariwen, whose Brennan-produced album won a Grammy. Many of Brennan’s projects are characterised by his thirst for exploration and drive to give underrepresented people a platform, as evidenced by recent albums recording inmates at Parchman Prison and centenarian singers in Azerbaijan. Brennan is also a writerand his latest book, Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End, contains many of the stories behind his albums, together with photography by his wife, Italian-Rwandan photographer/filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli. Here, we bring you a selection of excerpts from this new book, collecting stories behind some of the most singular albums that we have had the privilege of hearing.

Rohingya Refugees

Once I Had a Home

Hardly a ‘small’ country, Bangladesh has the eighth largest population in the world and is one of the most densely populated. It’s estimated that as many as three million people died during their battle for independence from Pakistan in 1971. Known for its humidity, the nation has never recorded a temperature below freezing.

In 1982, the Rohingya people were made stateless on the land they’ve lived on for thousands of years and became ‘unlisted’ as one of the Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) government’s 135 ‘national races.’ Today, the Myanmar military rulers refuse the use of the term Rohingya, instead referring to the Rohingya as illegal immigrants. The Myanmar military aggressions have officially been declared a genocide and experts state that the Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

The Rohingya refugee camp [in Bangladesh, bordering Myanmar] is estimated as the largest in the world and currently houses almost one million people. Most residents are not allowed to exit the camp, so we came to them. Gangs operate within the camp and women are often exploited for sex work due to food shortages. Currently, families are provided $0.08 a day for meals, yet a single egg costs $0.11.

With 96% humidity filling the summer air, the sweat blanketed my body in seconds, pouring off my face and onto the equipment, presenting a new operational hazard for the recording deck.

Here I achieved the dubious distinction of having been food poisoned on a fifth continent. I stood dehydrated in the midday sun as calls to prayer were sounded from all sides. People bowed down to pray just as I fell on all fours and blew chunks across an unfinished rooftop. If ever there was an opportunity for religious conversion or a sign from God, it was now.

There was no prompting from us as to what the singers should write about. Without fail, though, group after group sang about only two topics: the impact of the genocide and love songs. Titles like ‘We Were Forced Across the River (My Mother Died from the Pain)’ and ‘The Army Tortured Us & Raped My 12-year-old Cousin Before Killing Her’ repeatedly and consistently revealed the horrors. Though many female singers were invited to participate, none did so due to local religious customs that frowned upon women singing solo publicly. For the male groups, the mandolin was the core instrument, and they used a mop-bucket drum and tree-twigs for mallets.

As one vocalist described the ordeal he’d faced being exiled from his land, his voice suddenly broke and he began quivering. Soon the emotion radiated to his bandmates and then others gathered. It’s rare to see a group of grown men weeping openly together, especially those so otherwise stoic. I was overcome, but refrained, turning away.

Their pain was not mine to claim.

The oldest voice in the world

Thank you for bringing me back to the sky

‘My life is good. It is like a flower.

My life is as long as a tree, like a stone in the river.’

In the southern mountains of Azerbaijan – mere miles from the Iranian border – are the villages of the ‘long-livers.’ Legend has it that the world’s oldest man hailed from there – having survived to age 168 and fathered his twenty-third child when he was a mere 136, spanning two of my father’s lifetimes in one.

We ventured there as a deliberate act of anti-ageism, a counter to mass media’s festishising of youth. I’ve often preferred singers’ voices as they age: Little Jimmy Scott, Billie Holliday, Sinatra, Merle Haggard. Less pristine, but gaining depth and nuance.

We visited village after rural village ravaged by COVID. The tale was sadly the same, most residents over a hundred had died in recent months. That included the oldest known woman in the country. Years prior, the news of her being officially named as the nation’s oldest person had been widespread, but her death remained conspicuously unreported for over a year.

The seatbelt-less, local driver texted while steering with one knee and skirting a snowy cliff, and we faced the irony of dying prematurely a few football fields short of the village where the oldest person in history had lived. The razor-edged mountains there were enough to raise Ansel Adam from the dead, sparked by an urge to destroy his own aggrandised negatives.

Ultimately, we discovered person after person, laying on floor-bound mattresses as if awaiting our arrival, like wormholes tucked away within village back rooms.

Theirs were voices featuring distortion boxes built by time. While recording, I removed my headphones more than once thinking there was some malfunction in the machinery to only realise that what I was hearing was their pure tone. This was a rare instance of many people not making the cut for being too young – a mere 90 or 86 failed to impress. These are lives lived in analogue, standing as an antidote to Artificial Intelligence art and Auto-Tuned vocals.

With Azerbaijan being located on the other side of the globe, the echoes of First Nation American chants were made all the eerier. Maybe most striking was how often many of the singers, one hundred years on, sang of their mother[s].

One man asserted that “the shepherd sees everything.” Mid-song, that shepherd was overcome and stood to leave the room after having crooned a song his mother had sung. In awkward suspense, we feared our visit had caused him unnecessary upset or injury. But when he returned, he beamed, grabbed my hand, and kissed it repeatedly.

“Thank you for bringing me back to the sky,” he said.

Saramaccan Sound

Where the river bends is only the beginning

‘I cut down a tree.
I made two boats.
They will carry me to the sea.’

Entering the rain forest, ‘the lungs of the earth,’ we rode upriver to villages reached only by boat. We passed many communities that had been swallowed whole, as well as many of the still existing villages that soon may no longer be there – drowned downriver from the dams, engulfed by the rising tides. For now though, naked children bathed and played on the banks, scenes probably largely unchanged from centuries past. The river remains the lifeline.

The singers were Saramaccan. Linguists consider the Saramaccan language notable because its vocabulary is based on two European source languages, English (30%) and Portuguese (20%), and various West and Central African languages (50%), but it diverges considerably from all of them. The African component accounts for over half of the vocabulary, the highest percentage in the Americas. A language born from fugitive slaves, its meaning is camouflaged by shuffling around accented syllables and inverting tones.

Suriname has a little over half a million people and though it is geographically the smallest nation in South America, it is one of the least densely populated places on Earth.

The physical place where a recording occurs is a backing instrument in any music made. My laptop and two mics succumbed to the humidity – an offering to the sound Gods. Enveloped by forest and yards away from the river, the humidity seeping into the microphones is almost audible. And steel-string guitars are not an option. They rust almost instantaneously. So the mellower tone of nylon-strings defines the land.

A brother duo started by playing a Chuck Berry song, but reported that they did not know where the tune came from. “It’s just something we heard.” The reference to a ‘ding-a-ling’ seemed lost in transmission, converted phonetically from risqué to mere sound.

The main writer, singer and mentor was Jabini. A military man, he stood less than 5’ 6’’ but with an imposing build. His gym, a lifetime of hard work. He plays the guitar upside-down due to being left-handed.

With his mournful melodies and handle-bar moustache, it’s as if Merle Haggard had been raised in the Amazon instead of Bakersfield. (Lest it be forgotten, Mr Haggard’s band, The Strangers’ original front-man was African-American.)

And as so often is the case, the best songs emerged only after we were done recording. The equipment had to be re-setup three separate times and brought to the men on the front porch, as they sang almost non-stop through the night, growing freer as the bottles of rum were drained. They seemed in command of an almost inexhaustible ability to conjure new songs. Finally, they concluded with an anthem written on the spot: ‘One Mother, Two Hearts’.

Parchman Prison Prayer

Some Mississippi Sunday Morning

Instead of attending the Grammys, I opted to fly to Mississippi and record with prisoners at the notorious Parchman Prison. I had faith the ‘amateur’ voices there would be more compelling. The institution has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, RL Burnside, and even Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon Presley, having been former residents.

With just over a week’s notice I’d taken a red eye flight and would only be allowed a few hours inside the walls to record. One wrong turn on the way from the airport or a single delayed flight and the whole enterprise would’ve been moot.

A friend had warned that the prison is a place few people visit. In reality it is a place far too many go. With over two million people incarcerated, the United States currently leads the world both in the total number of people in prison and also the rate per capita. And Mississippi has the second highest incarceration rate in the country at more than six times the state, Vermont, with the lowest.

Mississippi’s oldest penitentiary, Parchman was established in 1901 and has one of the highest number of prisoner mortalities in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Parchman is located just a hop and a skip to the northwest of Money, Mississippi where Emmett Till was so heinously murdered. Scandals rocked the prison in recent years with multiple deaths and homicides. This led Jay-Z to file a class action suit on behalf of the inmates due to the ‘barbaric’ and ‘abhorrent’ conditions, with rat infestations and raw sewage filling common areas.

After years of bureaucratic finagling to make my visit possible, at the gate the guard waved me through without even searching me or my gear. I could’ve easily been smuggling bazookas or kilos. I parked, tossed together what little kit I’d been allowed, and within minutes of saying hello, we were recording.

Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artefacts from this meeting are the sounds, making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. This stands in stark contrast to increasingly image-based music. Rapists, murderers and sex offenders vocalising lifetimes of hurt.

All had eyes leaden with regret, hooded to protect themselves from the too much they’d already seen. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud them, an inescapable regret that their environment confronted them with unrelentingly. Voices softened and textured by mistakes rang as testament to the singers no longer being the people they’d been before.

Though many outstripped me in size and strength, not only were these men not menacing, they demonstrated greater effort than most to demonstrate their good intentions – that they’d ‘learned their lesson.’ Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material.

When an atheist takes to the music, genre and preconceptions have been transcended, and following the release of the album I saw this happen a hundred times over. A triumph of this recording was its successful integration of white and Black inmates, whose services had often been held separately due to racial tensions. Different prisoners didn’t start out sitting together but the boundaries gradually dissolved and it ended in hugs, laughter, high-fives and every single person in the room standing and playing together for ten minutes of unity.

These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours, expressing a depth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained.

The Good Ones

Rwanda… you see ghosts, I see sky

The Good Ones’ latest album concludes with the epic, seven-minute dirge ‘Love Can Lead the Way’, a lesson that they’ve hard-earned. If these two men – who’ve battled poverty their entire life, after already having survived a genocide – can embrace love as a path forward, that can’t but be something we should all ponder more closely.

Surely, there must be a better way.