Dear Mailing List

Andrea and I have been on an 18-month adventure, promoting And the Roots of Rhythm Remain from Seattle to Jaipur, Edinburgh to Querétaro. People and moments stick vividly in the memory, but few as powerfully as those from our visit to Minneapolis last March. Our event was at the Cedar Cultural Center, a warm and welcoming space that regularly presents the sort of performers likely to be snatched from the street by ICE thugs because of how they look or the language they speak. After our sound check, we strolled a few doors down for an Ethiopian meal in a family-run restaurant. Andrea, who spent much of her youth in Addis Ababa, declared it among the best she’d ever had.

The night before, we’d enjoyed one culinary revelation after another at a Hmong restaurant. A news item last week told of an ICE raid on the Twin Cities’ Hmong community. It’s hard to digest the brutality we see on those frigid streets while recalling the warm bonhomie of a wonderful restaurant filled with Minnesotans of all backgrounds. We were dining with old friends whose names it would be imprudent to mention since they are now helping feed immigrant families who are at risk if they leave home to work or to shop; one friend also acts as a scout, following ICE-identified license plates and alerting the resistance to their whereabouts.

There seem to be two Americas these days; at our events we meet the one that enjoys unfamiliar music, food, language and sharing community with people of varied cultural backgrounds. They also tend to like getting their facts straight. We peer across a divide at another America that’s frightened and repelled by the ‘other’ while resenting and resisting evidence that doesn’t support its prejudices. Residents of Minneapolis may or may not be more fact-loving than those in other American cities, but the region certainly seems to have embraced immigrants and the richness they bring with them. Perhaps the Scandinavian roots of many living at the headwaters of the Mississippi also make them bristle at Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. Whatever the case, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

Britain doesn’t have masked gunmen patrolling the streets and throwing innocent people in the back of a van but it’s worth remembering our 2013 MAGA-lite moment when Tory Home Secretary Teresa May sent vans through immigrant neighbourhoods with signs and loud-hailers telling people to ‘go home’ or ‘face arrest’. Being 83 years old means spending more time with NHS doctors and their support staff, about 90% of whom (in London, anyway) are clearly not ‘Anglo-Saxon’. I am always moved by the empathy, efficiency and cheerfulness with which I am treated. Most of these heroic health workers have, at some point, suffered racial abuse from people with my skin-tones, yet stick unwaveringly to the task of keeping us all in good health. I have a fantasy in which Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg fall ill and are confronted with a fiercely all-White team of nurses led by Louise Fletcher in her role as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest wielding a gigantic and rather dull hypodermic needle.

My current reading is The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. Among many discoveries is the fact that before the 16th century, White slavery was as widespread as Black slavery would become thereafter. When that abominable institution became too identified with Africans, the trade in White men was phased out and replaced with press-gangs, penal servitude and indentured labour. Young white women, however, were still often treated as ‘booty’ in the piratical sense of the word. The other revelation is how the Graeco-Roman world viewed ‘barbarians’, describing them as big and strong but also ugly, dirty and smelly. These ‘others’ were actually Teutons and extremely white, even disgustingly so, with pasty pale skin, matted straw-coloured hair, incomprehensible speech and uncouth habits. Once Germans, Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen had taken over ‘European civilization’, they picked up those descriptions once used to describe them and applied them to Africans. We hear echoes of Herodotus in Trump’s rants about dog-eating Haitians. It was Trump’s ancestors, however, about whom Herodotus was writing.

Shifting (but not too far) to more pleasant subjects, our visits to the Jaipur Literary Festival in India and the Hay Festival in Mexico also resonate. Hand-wringing articles (and academic friends’ reports) about the impossibility of getting Anglo-American students to read a book – any book – were on our minds in Jaipur as we watched eager crowds of young Indians flock to the talks and interviews, take notes, ask questions and buy stacks of books. The average age of Indian and Mexican audiences would be, at a guess, about half that of similar crowds in Britain or America. The world is young and eager for knowledge, though that’s not always apparent in our own media-deranged societies.

If the political turmoil of the 1960s infused the music of that decade with an extra level of intensity, might the current febrile atmosphere ratchet up the passion in today’s music? Only time’s rear-view mirror will tell, but Andrea and I certainly experienced a cornucopia of thrilling live music during the past year and a half: Tinariwen at the Green Man festival, Swamp Dogg and Arooj Aftab at Big Ears, the Halkiades band at Christopher King’s ‘Why The Mountains Are Black’ festival in northern Greece, Olivier Stankiewicz bringing rock energy to the baroque oboe, remarkably moving London tributes to Martin Carthy and The Incredible String Band, South Asian classical singer Muslim Shaggan at a Sikh temple, Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham at the Americana Festival, South African cellist Abel Selaocoe at the Wigmore Hall, Robert Plant’s Saving Grace at Festival Hall, Martin Hayes at the Borris Festival, a Shostakovich symphony at the London Proms and a few of his string quartets in a Minneapolis church, Trio Da Kali at the Barbican, Michael Shannon and Jason Nardurcy’s R.E.M.-tribute band performing my Fables of the Reconstruction, Martin Fröst nailing Copland’s Clarinet Concert at the Proms… A peak moment arrived for me during Emmylou Harris’s tour-de-force concert in Glasgow during the recent Celtic Connections. Early in my time as a record producer I noticed that harmony vocals sound way better blending in mid-air than when each singer has their own mic. So I was delighted when two from Emmylou’s great band, Phil Madeira and Kevin Key, joined her in a wide semi-circle around a single microphone to sing ‘Bright Morning Star’ a capella; the sound was indeed as warm and rich as I had hoped.

When I first heard bluegrass back in the early ‘60s, there was always a single mic and a ritual choreography for the banjo and dobro players to awkwardly lift their instruments toward it while taking snazzy solos and everyone leaning in to sing the choruses. It sounded great, of course. Audio is not the only place where old-fashioned less is an upgrade on modern more, but don’t get me started or we’ll be here all day.

Until the next….

Joe

***

NEW DATES 2026

8 Feb | London, UK | Listening Session for Peter Doig’s House of Music: Sound Service | Serpentine Gallery

12 Mar | Berlin, Germany | And The Roots of Rhythm Remain | Babylon Kino

26-29 Mar | Knoxville, TN, US | Big Ears Residency | Big Ears Festival
Presenting Newport and the Great Folk Dream (2025), And the Roots of Rhythm Remain Audiovisual I + II, Either/Orchestra plays Ethiopiques, films and conversations with Robert Gordon, Francis Falceto and Russ Gershon

1 Apr | New York City, US | And the Roots of Rhythm Remain | Film Forum

***

NEW MEDIA

Broken Record
Link

Essential Tremors
Link

BBC Radio 4, Artworks, What Happened to Counterculture?
Link

Takin’ A Walk – Music History with Buzz Knight
Link