Joe Boyd's New Book Reveals the West's Fascination with Music from Around the World

“It sounds dramatic to say it took 15 years to write,” Joe Boyd says of his new book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. “But for the first six or seven years I was doing a lot of other things at the same time, so it only kicked into high gear and became pretty monomaniacal for the last six years.”

Talking to the veteran producer via a Skype link to Albania, where he’s spending a few days seeing the local musicians he recorded on the 2017 album At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me: the Joys and Sorrows of Southern Albanian Song, I remind him that he first told me he was planning a book about world music when we attended a festival in Jodhpur together in 2007.

At the time his first book White Bicycles – Making Music in the 1960s had just been published, a cracking insider’s tale of producing records for the likes of Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band. One assumed the second book would take the story on to his adventures in world music when he issued albums by the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Trio Bulgarka and Kanda Bongo Man on his Hannibal label.

Turns out he had something far more ambitious in mind, which is why we’ve had to wait until 2024 to read And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. His publisher, Faber, is promoting the book as a ‘‘‘global music’ equivalent of Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise,’ the dazzling, award-winning survey of 20th-century Western classical music which Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic, published through Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.

It’s a fair comparison. Over 600 pages Ross traced a musical journey from Stravinsky and Schoenberg through Bartók and Britten to Cage and Ligeti – but the vast majority of the century’s music fell outside his conservatoire-defined paradigm. Ravi Shankar, for example, received just one passing reference for his collaboration with Philip Glass.

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – the title comes from a line in ‘Under African Skies’ from Paul Simon’s Graceland album – fills all the gaps in a magisterial survey that stretches from Africa to the Caribbean and Latin America and through Europe to South Asia via a complex web of musical trade routes.

“It’s not an academic book,” Boyd is at pains to stress, and certainly there is nothing dry or earnest about his writing, which is full of engaging anecdotes and stories. But the research that went into its writing would put many an academic to shame. At 900 pages it’s half as long again as Ross’ book and every bit as erudite – the bibliography of sources Boyd consulted runs to 27 pages.

“I did a lot of reading,” he says with considerable understatement. “In a way, the book is a digest. I read all these works by specialist academics, not just about the music but about its historical and social and political context. They’re fascinating, but they’re not page-turners and I was able to cherry-pick all the interesting incidents that highlighted the journey of the music.”

For instance, who knew that Charles Dickens wrote a scathing review of a Zulu choir’s performance in London in 1853? Or even for that matter that Black African singers travelled to Britain in the Victorian era when the closest English music got to recognising there was another world outside of its own country was Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado? For the record, Dickens once wrote that ‘If we have anything to learn from these noble savages it is what to avoid.’

The genesis of the book dates back to 1999 when Boyd was producing the ¡Cubanismo! album Mardi Gras Mambo, a celebration of the links between the musical cultures of New Orleans and Havana. Both derived from Africa and were shaped by colonial slavery – so how did their rhythmic sensibilities come to be so different, he wondered. He parked the question in the back of his mind, but promised himself that one day he’d look for the answer and see if there was a book in it.

The answers he found involved Dizzy Gillespie and a 1552 Islamophobic edict by the king of Spain, “which seemed like a pretty good start, so I decided to keep going,” he explains. Further discoveries included that Afrobeat began with a subscription to a US jazz magazine and that Frank Sinatra owed his career to a French tango singer from Buenos Aires. For more, you’ll have to read the book.

“It’s a different sort of legacy from all the records I’ve produced,” Boyd says of his magnum opus. “I’ve got shelves of books about R&B and pop, but I wanted to turn the spotlight on all this other exotic music from around the globe that has delighted us but to which people don’t know the back stories.”

He chose a quote from Graceland as the title for several reasons. “That was the record that opened the doors to the emergence of a Western middle-class world music audience,” he notes. “Ten per cent of the people who bought Graceland then went out and bought records by Ladysmith [Black Mambazo] and Mahlathini.”

The presence of the word ‘rhythm’ in the title is also significant. “Most collaborations between Western musicians and traditional musicians have got it wrong,” he believes. “They focus on melody and harmony and virtuosity and put that over a mid-Atlantic beat so that much world music is rhythmically very bland. But for me, the music lives in the rhythm.”

One of the most valuable aspects of the book is the way that in a world of musical miscegenation, Boyd joins up all the dots. One chapter opens with Ravi Shankar and for the next 100 pages takes in the influence of Indian classical music on The Byrds, The Beatles, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, moves seamlessly from raga to qawwali and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and then on to Roma music and flamenco, taking in Django Reinhardt’s influence on BB King and Manitas de Plata meeting Bob Dylan at a Gypsy festival in the south of France. Everything connects and it’s all done without a single jolt in the sequential logic.

In another chapter, Boyd describes Louis Armstrong arriving in Accra where ET Mensah and his band play Armstrong a tune he immediately recognised as a melody he’d heard as a boy on the streets of New Orleans played by descendants of Haitian refugees. It’s a perfect example of one of Boyd’s central purposes in showing “how diverse yet inescapably linked we all are.”

As one of the industry professionals who invented the ‘world music’ tag as a marketing concept at a famous meeting above a north London pub in 1987, Boyd mounts a stout defence of the term. “We weren’t trying to define the music, but to identify an audience and steer them towards records they might enjoy,” he explains.

In recent years the term has been much criticised, but he welcomes the argument. “Challenging these labels is healthy because it can reveal assumptions that might be colonialist or racist or sexist in their implication and haven’t been fully thought through,” he reasons. Nevertheless, there’s baffled amusement as to why ‘global’ now seems to be the accepted term while ‘world’ is regarded as problematic. There’s a lovely phrase he uses about “music from over the horizon,” which is more poetic and evocative than either ‘world’ or ‘global’ but is probably not snappy enough to catch on as a Grammy category.

One of the fascinating themes Boyd tackles is the divergence between a Western middle-class desire for ‘authenticity’ and local tastes in developing economies that reject tradition in favour of an imported modernity. To give just one famous example, it’s the kind of dichotomy that has seen Buena Vista Social Club’s self-titled album sell eight million copies worldwide without being played on Cuban radio. He likens the tension between modernity and tradition to tourists going to a local restaurant to eat traditional dishes “but as soon as the kids serving this wonderful food have a break, they run down the road to the local KFC.”

Burna Boy and the army of global rappers are notable absentees from his narrative. “I’ve heard many tracks made in the modern way that are enjoyable but they don’t enter my head from the same door,” he says. “You don’t feel the breathing of the rhythm section and to me, it doesn’t have the same life.”

In the final chapter of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, Boyd concludes that world music enjoyed a golden age lasting roughly from 1925 to the end of the century. It comes to a halt with the drum machine and AutoTune. “I don’t want to be some old fart like King Canute standing on the seashore trying to hold back the technology because I understand the appeal, but it does change everything,” he argues.

At 82, Boyd has lost none of his energy and has spent much of the summer dictating And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – all 400,000 words of it – into a microphone for an audiobook. After that, he plans a YouTube channel “so that people reading the book can listen along and hear what I’m talking about.”

Despite the threat of AI, he’s not entirely pessimistic that the future belongs to machines. “I like to think whenever a tide seems to be sweeping all before it there is always an undercurrent going back the other way. There is so much great music all over the world being made without gadgets and wonderful, beautiful stuff being played.”

As the title has it, the roots of rhythm remain.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today