On the subject of challenges: when Joe Boyd’s near-1,000 page epic And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain landed on my doorstep I baulked at the size of it. It’s taken Boyd – a musical scholar best known for producing music by Nick Drake and Pink Floyd, and bringing American blues artists such as Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the UK – 17 years to release a follow-up to his much-loved autobiography White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.
It appears he’s spent all of that time tirelessly researching this global music opus, which sprawls across time and continents, connecting dots between traditional folk music and its contemporary successors. I needn’t have felt intimidated – despite its size and vast subject matter the book is a breeze to read. The narrative is built on stories, which Boyd has accumulated plenty of.
He even had a hand in coining the term ‘world music’ (the divisiveness of which he addresses in the pages in earnest). As I concluded when I spoke to Joe about it for Manchester Literature Festival in October, it may be the only book about popular music you’ll ever need to read.
The evolution of Ethiojazz is covered extensively in And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, and it’s thrilling to close out the year accompanied by a new record by the genre’s pioneer, Mulatu Astatke. Tension, a collaboration with Tel Aviv’s Hoodna Orchestra, is upbeat and brass heavy, augmenting traditional modal melodies with a joyful swing.
Finally, I attended Laurie Anderson’s Ark: United States V at Factory International in Manchester not knowing quite what to expect. The online blurb, though extensive, offered little clarity. On stage, Anderson introduced the show as an opera, giving a detailed synopsis of what was to come, most of which failed to materialise. No matter, what did follow was as engaging as it was disorienting, our magnetic host escorted us through animated visuals, AI-assistant vignettes, beautiful music, stories from science, her childhood and outer space.
She invited us to participate in collective screaming and Tai Chi. The subject matter was unflinchingly grim; politics, climate change, AI’s trivialisation of truth. But the brightness in her voice held a spark of optimism which has stuck with me since the curtain came down. Uncertainty awaits us in 2025, but I believe her message was this: great art grows in dark places.
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