A Visionary Amongst Producers: Joy Boyd: And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. A Journey Through Global Music, 2024, review of the book

After graduating from Harvard, Boyd moved to England to open a branch of the Elektra label, focused on artists like the Butterfield Blues Band or new bands emerging on the West Coast. At the same time, he became one of the hidden architects of the swinging London scene. At the age of 21 he brought Muddy Waters to Britain, produced Pink Floyd’s first single, and together with photographer and activist John “Hoppy” Hopkins opened the underground club UFO in December 1966. While Hopkins served 6 months for smoking weed, Boyd held back: “I cheated, I never did much. My goal was to become an éminence grise, and in doing so I denied one of the myths of the 60s: I was there, and I remember it.”

At various stages of his career, alongside Pink Floyd, he “discovered” Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, and the later members of the Swedish pop icon Abba. Although he had dozens of opportunities to do so, he never used his skills as a manager for any of the later megastars. His priority was the creative process, working as a producer in the studio and shaping the final recording. In this field, he contributed to dozens of unique albums of the British folk rock era with artists such as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band. In 1973, he produced a documentary film about Jimi Hendrix, and as a co-producer he participated in Amazing Grace, a film depicting Aretha Franklin when she recorded her eponymous album in 1972. However, due to technical and legal disputes, the documentary was not released to the public until 2018.

When the rock scene was losing its creative momentum in the 1980s, he turned his attention to Eastern Europe. For the global audiences, he discovered artists such as Muzsikás and Márta Sebestyén from Hungary and the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. Less is known about how his role in introducing the Bulgarian female choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, a “discovery” attributed to the Swiss organist Marcel Cellier and the British label 4AD 20 years later. “I’ll never forget the first time I heard them: thirty-five women screaming in unearthly, almost dissonant harmonies,” remembers Boyd. “The traditional custom of pairs of women singing ballads – with one holding a drone while the other chants the melody and often approaches to within a quarter tone – can make hairs rise on your arms, but in a good way. A bel canto voice would make such notes unlistenable, the vibrato muddying what in Bulgaria is pure and clear… These harmonic collisions, simultaneously horrifying and thrilling, are at the heart of arrangements by Filip Koutev and make it impossible to use classically trained voices.”

 

Fusion versus authenticity

Boyd works as a producer in a market economy environment, but unlike routine professionals who construct musically lame fusions, he has different priorities. The music should hold together as an organic unit. He claimed that the “sexiest rhythms come from live playing, not from drum machines.”

He explained his production aesthetic in detail at the 2004 Womex conference. “All over the ‘developed’ world, arts centres and clubs fill their schedules with Cubans, Brazilians, Touaregs, Mongolians, Mexicans, Javanese and Nigerians. But the plans that their producers are making here at Womex are absurd. How can you spend hard money on unbearably complicated fusions that will never pay for themselves?” He illustrated his point with his experience from Cuba, where he had travelled to record years before the Buena Vista project, with a suitcase stuffed with banknotes, a total of $20,000, to pay the musicians on the spot. “We worked in a wrecked studio that had once been built for live recordings. The musicians played brilliantly, and we recorded four songs on the first day. But our Cuban flutist, fascinated by Western sound technology, saw it differently: ‘This sounds like a demo. When are we going to make a real recording? When are we going to do all these other overdubs?’” Boyd explained that the recording he is doing will impress American audiences just with its natural charm. Later it appeared in two films and earned the incredulous flutist $80,000 in royalties alone. Boyd had similar priorities regarding African music.

“Years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with Youssou N’Dour… who wanted me to produce his next record. I suggested that we record music similar to what he plays for the domestic market in Senegal, and he accused me of racism. He said I wanted him to be a ‘museum exhibit’. I said that all I was doing was predicting what would sell best and make him the most money.”

On the other hand, in the chapter dedicated to Congo, Boyd elaborates on the concept of successful fusions. “To my ears, most fusion projects get it backwards, laying down a culture-neutral backing track for the ‘exotic’ musicians to play over (the egregious One Giant Leap being the most glaring example) rather than letting them set the beat…. My ideal fusions, of course, would have been for Celia Cruz and Bill Withers to sing a few numbers with Rochereau’s band at the Rumble in the Jungle.”

As mentioned before, it was Boyd who was the first to release music from Hungary and the Balkans on his Hannibal label. These were not academic field recordings, but authentic live music for general audiences, like the group Muzsikás or clarinetist Ivo Papasov. Boyd mapped Eastern Europe even before the fall of the Iron Curtain, when Soviet-style folk mega-ensemble groups still ruled.

 

Stalin’s concept of folklore

“The pioneer of the Soviet model of gigantic ensembles was Igor Moiseyev. Originally a choreographer, he worked for the Bolshoi Theatre,” explains Boyd in the article How Stalin created World Music, published in the British newspaper Independent in 2003. “He hated authentic folk music; in his opinion it was low, amateurish and inferior, which motivated him to create ‘high’ folklore. Everything he did was choreographed. It was the masses, not the individual, who dominated in his ensembles. At that time, the Soviet Union was undergoing forced collectivization and drastic agricultural reforms, which were associated with the destruction of national identity, peasant life and culture, and the liquidation of independent farmers, known as kulaks. After the war, the Eastern Bloc countries formed their own governments according to the Soviet model. Each had its own minister of culture and Moiseyev showed them how to build a folklore mega-ensemble.” When, after perestroika, Russian state television featured a program documenting the folk traditions, the editor in charge received a threatening phone call from the ninety-year-old Moiseyev: “Such music does not exist, you will not broadcast it.”

While Czech and Slovak folklore was decimated by imposed arrangements and Soviet-style choreography, the Hungarians did not like it. “They had a huge state folklore ensemble too, but in the late 1960s, after the bloody suppression of the anti-communist uprising, there was a certain relaxation. Instead of artificial and fake choreography, they were learning how to dance the traditional way. The band Muzsikás was created as a spontaneous reaction to the official ensembles. I remember one beautiful moment, sometime in 1987. In Budapest, I made friends with a local singer, and we went to a Muzsikás concert in a tiny university theatre on the other side of the river. It was a fantastic show. First, modern dance, accompanied by a Hungarian jazz band, which I usually don’t like, but this was very special. In the second half, the same dancers who had been experimenting before came on stage dressed as peasants and performed a country wedding dance. And then came the finale. When the song started, my companion flinched. She was obviously taken aback and whispered to me what the song was about. ‘It’s called Eddig Vendég, The Uninvited Guest: you drank all the wine, you broke the plates, you trampled on the ladies’ clothes, you ruined the party, you got drunk and now you refuse to leave. Bartender – throw him out.’ A folk song about a typical bar situation that could happen anywhere. But singing it as a climax was brave. Many expected the musicians’ boldness to be punished, because the uninvited guest, the Soviet Army, did not leave Hungary and other Eastern European countries until several years later.”

At the same time, a good eight years before the Balkan brass bands were introduced to Western audiences by Emir Kusturica’s film Underground, Boyd discovered a virtuoso Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. “We went a little way outside Sofia, and there was a band on stage in the cultural center. And it was absolutely terrible. Something like a school orchestra playing folk tunes arranged by Blood Sweat and Tears. ‘But we have another interesting soloist here,’ claimed my interpreter, whom I had hired privately, outside the official structures. In the next song, Ivo appeared on stage out of nowhere and cut out an amazing clarinet solo. He was a guest with the band. We went behind the corner, I asked him: ‘Do you only play with this band?’ And he replied: ‘Nooooo, I have my own band. We are playing at a wedding this weekend.’ I rented a car, bought a map, looked up the village on the map, drove from Sofia for about three hours. There was a big tent on the edge of the village. I had the best wedding of my life there.”

 

World music as a concept

Joe Boyd was one of 20 participants in a meeting in London’s Russian Empress pub in 1987, where the marketing term “world music” was born, as well as the subsequent campaign that established it as a shelf in music stores and thus consolidated the position of dozens of independent labels and agencies. Within six months, world music sections were introduced in stores from Paris to Tokyo, and the new term took hold on radio, concert programming and in the columns of music magazines. Yes, the label has been attacked many times as artificial “pigeonholing”, the most famous being David Byrne’s article “I Hate World Music” published in the New York Times in 1999. “But how many tickets would he have sold for the tour of his favourite Peruvian singer Susana Baca without the media and festival infrastructure that we started at that time?” asks Boyd. And he explains the broader context: “I’d immersed my youthful self in the holy trinity of blues, jazz and rock ’n’roll, then added British folk to the mix when I moved to London and embarked on my career as a producer.” During the next decades, the initial spark gradually vanished. “Many music buffs were seeking refuge from years of assault by disco, punk, prog rock and glam rock, styles that repudiated much of what had drawn us to music in the first place: virtuosity, spontaneity, roots. Popular forms from faraway cultures, particularly African ones, seemed to offer a chance to regain some of what had been lost.”

During the golden era, when people still bought CDs and the proceeds could finance specialized projects, Boyd recorded a number of unique albums: the Songhai series with the Andalusian nuevo-flamenco group Ketama and the Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate, or the album Kulanjan with Taj Mahal, Diabate and other guests from Mali, which President Obama once called his favourite album.

I was happy enough to meet Boyd regularly at Womex and similar events. I remember our first meeting in 1991, when I asked him if he was interested in any musician from Czechoslovakia. At first, he diplomatically replied that he loved Janáček, but nothing from the contemporary scene caught his interest. “Central European music is not very exciting,” he explained. “The interesting things happen on the borders of the continent – where there is Moorish influence, in Spain, or Turkish influence, in the Balkans.” This is also documented by his production, including the aforementioned group Ketama, or the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. It was not until a few years later that in our conversation he mentioned a then unknown singer, Marta Töpferová, born in Czechoslovakia, but based in New York City, and exploring Latin music. “She sounds completely different from most singers from Latin America. Her work reminds me more of bossa nova, that quiet Brazilian style, whereas singers from Spanish-speaking countries tend to be loud, pathetic, and show off.”

 

Hours of Exciting Reading

Boyd’s book’s title, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is a well-chosen borrowing from Paul Simon’s song, Under African Skies. Inspired by South Africa, it was part of his album Graceland (1986), a pop culture masterpiece that served as a “gateway” to the era of world music. The title also paraphrases Boyd’s credo. Rhythm, created by live musicians with real instruments and not machines, is the vital force that attracts Western listeners to the music of non-European cultures. The book has 9 chapters, mapping broader geographical and historical units: South Africa, Cuba and the USA, Jamaica, India with Roma music and flamenco, Brazil, Argentina and tango, Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa. It is the most comprehensive study on the subject to date, with an impressive 930 pages including the index, and Boyd worked on it for 17 years.

Boyd presents facts as arguments, adding his own opinions gently as a rare spice. Fascinating stories that connect seemingly distant cultural circles is another strong point. Right in the opening chapter from South Africa: “Mahlathini’s harsh voice was a fantastic instrument, eclipsing the sandpaper standards set by Tom Waits or Satchmo himself with its power and musicality.” At the same time, he provokes the reader when he shows how culturally different the place the music comes from is. What does Mahlathini buy with his first real earnings after returning from a 1988 European tour? Well, a cow. Another example, from the most freezing years of the Cold War: Willis Conover, who presented jazz on the “subversive” Voice of America station, visited Leningrad as a tourist. Local fans identified him, pulled him onto the stage at a concert, and when Conover agreed to introduce the next band, the entire hall recognized him by his voice.

According to Boyd, the era of world music began in 1853 in London, when Charles Dickens wrote a scathing review of a South African choir, and ended with the invention of autotune and drum machines. Although the book devotes 240 pages to Africa, Burna Boy and the entire army of global rappers are absent. “I’ve heard many tracks made in the modern way that are enjoyable but they don’t enter my head from the same door. You don’t feel the breathing of the rhythm section and to me, it doesn’t have the same life.”

Along with the history and changes in musical styles, he describes the development of colonialism, the effect of international pressures, commercial interests and unpredictable changes in mass taste in general. In this context, music works as a weapon against repression, a pillar of cultural identity, a tool questioning social taboos. Boyd’s style deserves special mention. Like a good musician, he avoids unnecessary notes. As a master of abbreviation, in one sentence he says what another would need the whole paragraph for. But the book is not intended for the culturally ignorant. Some cultural history knowledge is needed: who Cab Calloway or Erik Satie were, or where Presley started his career.

 

Motivation. Stories. Overlaps.

“I always loved the stories behind the music: Elvis shyly asking the Sun Records receptionist how much it would cost to record a demo for his mother’s birthday, Louis Armstrong inventing scat-singing when he forgot the lyrics,” explains Boyd. And he also admits that his own curiosity motivated him to write the book when, in 1999, he produced the Mardi Gras Mambo album by the orchestra ¡Cubanismo!, which maps the differences between the styles of Cuba and New Orleans. Both musical cultures have roots in Africa, both were shaped by slavery, but despite this, the rhythm works differently in each region. The roots are in history, the British and the Spanish brought slaves from different parts of Africa, differing in musical traditions. The British operated in the Sahel, where there were no trees, so lutes dominated over the drums, while the Spanish territory was the forested regions of the south. Moreover, the British feared drums as a potential signal for rebellion. Portuguese slave ship captains, on the other hand, allowed Africans to come on board and dance, which reduced mortality during the voyage. And the Spanish, unlike the English, found that if they kept slaves in their original community and allowed them to stick to their African customs, it would prolong their lives.

That is why the jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie was so fascinated by the Cuban conga player Chano Pozo, whose rhythmic skills far exceeded those of black drummers from the USA. Their collaboration produced several classic compositions, the most famous of which is 1947’s “Manteca.” As Dizzy fondly recounted, Chano hypnotized the audience by taking off his shirt and playing long solos, accompanied by sacred Afro-Cuban chants. A year later, Chano was shot dead in a New York bar by a drug dealer who had previously sold him oregano instead of weed. Dizzy and his band, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and dozens of others attended the funeral.

Unlike most books available so far, Boyd uncovers the details, gets to the heart of the matter, and puts the differences into perspective. Examples? Passive listening is impolite in West Africa. Griots, members of a musical caste, expect shouts of encouragement from the audience when singing celebratory epics. Couple dancing is a purely European phenomenon that did not exist in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. In Europe, it served as an excuse for couples to touch each other, which an African would consider unnecessary or hypocritical.

Boyd also pays close attention to the instruments. Claves, the simple percussion that drives the rhythm of a Cuban orchestra, are not just any pair of wooden sticks, and they entered music as a by-product of shipbuilding. When the Spanish ran out of wood from their own forests, they moved the production of sailboats to Cuba. The hardwood pins that hold the hull together produce a beautiful timbre in the hands of a skilled player, which Federico García Lorca described as a “wooden raindrop.” Thanks to its timbre, the sound of the claves easily penetrates the singing and music of the band and serves as a solid pulse typical of Afro-Cuban music for musicians and dancers.

After Castro’s revolution, the Cuban musical climate cooled down. “Castro himself didn’t dance, not even one step,” explains Boyd. According to him, the Czechoslovak embassy in Havana helped to compensate for the inconvenience. The ambassador serving at the time loved bebop and played Monk and Miles on his gramophone for his diplomatic guests.

Boyd also explains the origin of Jamaican “sound systems”. These “mobile discos” were invented by the colonial administration, which granted private licences to circulate news and advertisements, combined with music, in public spaces. Jamaicans used the opportunity to spread music according to their own taste, which started the emergence of ska and later reggae. “The sound systems served as a lively dating agency, a fashion show, an information exchange, a street status parade ground… while also providing a community bulletin board, with DJs announcing who was out of jail or back from England,” writes Boyd.

 

How George Harrison discovered the sitar

Boyd also corrects some common myths. George Harrison discovered Indian music indirectly, through joint parties with the Byrds in California, when the Beatles rented a villa in Hollywood belonging to actress Zsa Zsa Gabor after their triumphant concert at Shea Stadium. “Parties were non-stop, with plenty of girls, fellow celebrities, grass and LSD. On the night of 25 August, John Lennon and George Harrison ended up in Zsa Zsa’s enormous (empty) bathtub, listening with stoned fascination as McGuinn and Crosby extolled the wonders of Indian music, of Ravi Shankar and of the modal scales McGuinn demonstrated on a guitar, a moment that has gone down in history as the start of Harrison’s lifelong bond with India and its music.”

The Indian chapter is one of the most impressive in the entire book in terms of how many musical threads it connects. The beginnings of minimalism started by Philip Glass, Terry Riley and others. The Parisian pedagogue visionary Nadia Boulanger. Romani music including flamenco. The rise of Django Reinhardt and his little-known influence on B. B. King. Bob Dylan’s meeting with guitarist Manitas de Plata in a pilgrimage town in the south of France that later became the base of the Gipsy Kings.

Another charm of the book is how it puts facts, often quoted out of context by other writers, into realistic perspective. Yes, the Brazilian military junta exiled two of the main figures of the Tropicalia movement, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. But they were allowed one concert, a benefit before their forced flight to Europe, to pay for their airfare.

A large part of the book is dedicated to tango. Why? At the beginning of the 20th century, tango became one of the first global trends, despite (or because of?) its controversial flavour. Since then, tango’s African roots have fallen into oblivion, and Argentina’s black population has died out in epidemics or wars. “Most couple-dances… make you laugh and forget your troubles, whereas tango is all about your troubles and makes trouble exciting.” And the European cliché “Would you like to dance?” with the risk of rejection does not apply in Buenos Aires. “No Argentine man will cross the floor, stand in front of a seated woman, ask her to dance and risk being refused. Male eyes scan the room, settle on a potential partner, attempt eye contact and, if found and held, he nods, she nods and they join together for a twelve-minute tanda, the four-tune set that marks the unit by which time is measured at a milonga. Julie Taylor, an American sociologist, struggled with it; after several agonising evenings of not being asked at all, she realised that her New York routine when a stranger met her gaze was to quickly lower it.”

Africa remains the harshest musical terrain: military coups and massacres, social prejudices, zero infrastructure, and pirated cassettes being the only functional music carrier. But even in these conditions it is possible to survive. Senegalese people have a special talent for doing business in difficult situations. Producer Ibrahima Sylla was born to well-off Senegalese parents in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and stuck to his own principles. A contract with an artist is always for one project, because conditions change unpredictably. A new album is kept secret until tens of thousands of cassettes have been sent to all corners of West Africa, so they are on the shelves before the pirates copy them. Omou Sangare, today the region’s greatest singer, released her first and still unsurpassed album Moussolou at the age of 21 on Sylla’s label Syllart.

 

Stravinsky, Bartók and Diaghilev

The book goes far beyond world music boundaries. Boyd logically includes Béla Bartók, who, as one of the first composers, had unconditional respect for folk music and unknowingly paved the way for the Hungarian folk revival táncház. Boyd also pays attention to stage productions that follow local roots. The Argentine director duo Hector Orezzoli and Claudio Segovia have penetrated world stages, including Broadway, with their revues Flamenco Pure, Tango Argentino and Black and Blue: “Studying Orezzoli and Segovia’s productions should be mandatory for anyone involved in presenting ‘world’ or ‘roots’ music. They treat the music and the culture from which it comes with total respect: no apologies, no dilutions, no fusions, no kitsch storylines, no narration, just top-of-the-line sets, sound and lights and elite performers.”

Boyd goes into even more detail about Russian music, starting with the “mighty handful” (Balakirev/Borodin/Kyu/Rimsky-Korsakov/Mussorgsky) in the 19th century, through Stravinsky, and of course the ballet impresario Diaghilev, who staged the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913: “I was awed by this fellow producer’s ability to keep the theatrical equivalent of an indie label going at such a level for nearly a quarter-century, all the while nurturing the composers who would shape twentieth-century music,” Boyd writes about Diaghilev. He then places the premiere itself in a broader historical context: “By opening night on 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring had been rehearsed for an unprecedented 120 hours… Parisians expected, at the very least, to see under ballerinas’ tutus as they were borne aloft by a muscular male dancer. What they were absolutely unprepared for was a stage full of girls in shapeless beige shifts stomping on the floor and gesticulating jerkily to a pounding, unfamiliar, inelegant rhythm… The brilliance of Stravinsky’s music camouflaged its subtexts, which were as totalitarian as Moiseyev’s. The Maiden dances to her doom without sensuality, passion or resistance; in her submission to the elders, she echoes the conformity demanded by tsars, commissars and now Putin. Stravinsky always resisted any attempt to analyse the thinking behind Rite, which is unsurprising given Taruskin’s research, which reveals the composer to have been a fervent member of a sinister cult known as Turanianism, which, like Eurasianism, professed by Putin’s ideologue Dugin, is defined against European values.”

Boyd further illustrates this by comparing Stravinsky and Bartók. Hitler kept a list of banned composers, which included Stravinsky. When he asked to be removed, Hitler complied. Whereas Bartók, on the other hand, asked to be included.

 

How Musical Diversity Disappears

In the concluding chapter, only 24-pages long, entitled How We Begin to Remember, Boyd searches for a reference point from which to connect, sort and close all these stories, and evaluate what we have lost. At the same time, we see tension rising between the world that is leaving and the one that may come, both in music and in general. “Metaphors are tempting. Are modern recordings a sonic fast food, tasty, briefly satisfying, but unhealthy?” asks Boyd. “A more apt analogy is biodiversity. At first we don’t notice the birds and insects disappearing from the landscape, but in the long run it comes back to haunt us like a domino effect of losses in our natural world.”

The book’s cover features endorsements from elite musicians like Brian Eno and Robert Plant. But the most telling words are from Ry Cooder: “One only hopes this is taught in schools.”

 

The book is accompanied by a Spotify playlist, which has a total of 100 items. Find it here:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/24GhXLuPuOWivQ661vUNBl

https://www.joeboyd.co.uk/the-music