Legendary music producer’s latest book offers an alternative music history and travelog looking at “how jazz, rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll would never have happened if it weren’t for the notes and rhythms emanating from over the horizon”.
The latest book by legendary music producer Joe Boyd seeks out to explore in great detail the backstories of some of the most “extraordinary” musicians from around the world, including from Joujouka.
In And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, Boyd examines how “personalities, events and politics in places such as Havana, Lagos, Budapest, Kingston and Rio are as colourful and momentous as anything that took place in New Orleans, Harlem, Laurel Canyon or Liverpool”.
Boyd’s global study extends to Morocco, as the book includes a section on the Master Musicians of Joujouka, exploring times when the group performed for sultans in the 1400s, to visits of Brion Gysin and Brian Jones – and most recently to 2023’s Glastonbury festival opening set, “before Elton John, Lana Del Ray and Guns n’ Roses took their turns on stage”.
Boyd muses on the “music and ritual” of Joujouka and how the group’s sounds could be the closest thing to “knowing what a days-long party sounded like in Athens in the fifth century BCE”.
The book was recently launched in London with an In Conversation event at Foyles with Brian Eno talking to Boyd.
Eno said: “I doubt I’ll ever read a better account of the history and sociology of popular music than this one.”
At the event Boyd said: “A lot of the book is about connections. It’s about the way the music travels across oceans and across borders, in many, many different ways.”
Artists produced by Boyd include Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Taj Mahal and Fairport Convention, with many of these experiences detailed in his previous book, the 2005 memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. As a film producer, his credits include Amazing Grace, Scandal, and Jimi Hendrix.
And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (published in the UK by Faber & Faber and in the US by Ze Books) is available now in all good bookshops
