My (very) occasional newsletters are usually upbeat reports of visits to exotic festivals or great concerts. This will be more somber, focusing instead on lives that touched mine – and many of yours – and which reached their end during these past months.

* * *

Kate McGarrigle grew up in the Laurentians outside Montreal. She and her two sisters joined their father and mother around a piano in the evenings and sang. Parental praise was earned by finding a good harmony part. There was no tv. Their father was born in the 19th century.

In their teens, she and Anna joined various folk groups and Kate travelled a small circuit of coffee houses before returning to Montreal to complete a chemical engineering degree at McGill University. She went back on the road after graduation, met Loudon Wainwright III, started writing songs, married him, gave birth to Rufus and settled in New York City.

I met her in the mid-Seventies because Maria Muldaur, whose first album I was producing, wanted to sing Kate’s “Work Song”. The album included “Midnight At the Oasis” so Kate earned something from the song-writing royalties. When Maria was ready to make her next album, Kate sent her a demo of songs. We picked one called “Cool River”, with delicious, earthy-but-ethereal harmonies I assumed were Kate double-tracked. We invited her out to Los Angeles to add them to Maria’s version and she asked if she could bring Anna. I approved the extra ticket thinking she needed help with the baby. But that unforgettable day in the studio they all turned up, Kate and Anna stood around the piano with Maria and sang while Rufus kept quiet in a basket in the corner.

The sound of those voices together was one of the most astounding things I had heard in my musical life to that date. I persuaded Warner Brothers give us studio time to make a demo. Kate & Anna signed a contract and with engineer John Wood and co-producer Greg Prestopino we embarked on one of the richest – and proudest – recording experiences of my life. I have always loved recording and mixing harmonies; memories of blending those voices into the stereo master of the first McGarrigle album still give me a thrill. We mixed “Heart Like A Wheel” in short snippets cut together; in those pre-automation days the balances were so tricky we could never get more than a few lines right at a time.

Between demo and recording Kate split up with Loudon, but they got back together before the album was released so Kate was too pregnant with Martha to go on tour promoting it. I thought the Warner Brothers art department let us down with the cover. The album didn’t sell – one of the great disappointments of my life. A second album didn’t do any better.

Over the years, Kate & Anna began touring and slowly built an audience. Eventually, everyone realized how much they loved the first album. The British embraced them, so they came to London every few years. Kate and I argued about the touring band – they wanted a Hammond B3 player and a drummer, the cost of which meant tours were rarely profitable. They hated being pigeon-holed as folkies.

Linda Ronstadt and Emmy Lou Harris recorded their songs, their children began to grow and to sing, I licensed their records for my Hannibal label and they had a reunion with me and John Wood for The McGarrigle Hour. Rufus and Martha recorded two of their earliest compositions for it. Loudon came up for a couple of days and sang “What’ll I Do?” with Kate and their two kids. Not a dry eye in the studio.

I visited Montreal and St Sauveur from time to time. Kate turned me on to her favourite historian, Francis Parkman, and I turned her onto mine, Lesley Blanch. She and Anna and Rufus and Martha sang at my 60th Birthday party (cleverly located next door to their concert at the Newport Folk Festival). I shared her pride in her two remarkable kids and their growing success – which brought her through London more and more often. She was the proudest of mothers at the premiere of Rufus’ opera Prima Donna last summer at the Manchester International Festival.

By then she had been diagnosed with cancer and had had multiple operations; I rang her about a week after the last one and she was out of breath. I asked her if she felt OK, she said she felt great, having just walked in the door from a 3-hour cross-country skiing trek.

The family asked me to produce the annual Christmas concert, in London last year at the Royal Albert Hall instead of the usual Carnegie Hall in New York; there was an unspoken understanding that this might be her last. When Martha came to town for her Piaf shows in November, seven months pregnant, she went into pre-mature labour and a tiny son, Arcangelo, was born (now doing fine). Kate flew over, brought food and grandmotherly affection to the hospital and in her spare time worked with us preparing the concert. She wrote a new song, “Proserpina”, about the goddess the Greeks called Persephone and how she created winter because her daughter was far away and not coming home.

The week before the concert, Kate flew to Montreal for a scan and discovered things had gotten worse. She underwent exhausting treatment and travelled back to London in time to rehearse. She was at her shining best that night; everyone I spoke to said it was one of the most remarkable evenings of music they had experienced. (YouTube has some clips from the show filed under “Not So Silent Night”.)

Back in Montreal, Kate held court on the sofa, then in her bedroom. I visited her in early January; she was as witty and sardonic as ever. She died on January 18, surrounded by her family, everyone singing. There was a cathedral funeral in Old Montreal with lots more singing; she was buried behind the church in St Sauveur-des-Monts, near the start of her favourite cross-country skiing trail.

Kate occupied a central place in my personal Pantheon of the greatest musicians I have known. Her songs are smart, romantic, cynical, tuneful and deeply rooted in the traditions she loved. She was demanding, determined, fierce, gentle, loving and never, ever dull. We could start a conversation about a recording or a concert and end up talking for an hour about the Ottoman Empire. I miss her terribly.

* * *

On June 12, I am organizing a tribute concert to Kate as part of Richard Thompson’s Meltdown at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Her family and other well-known guests will sing her songs. I know, it’s the day England plays the USA in the World Cup, so we’ll start it at 430 so someone’s iPhone doesn’t reveal an England (or American! – it’s possible) goal while Emmy Lou Harris is singing “Mendocino”, Linda Thompson performs “Go Leave” or Martha does “First Born Son”.

This link will take you straight to the South Bank ticket site  – seats go on Sale Thursday April 14.  I gather tickets are expected to go fast, so if you want to go, I advise buying immediately…!

* * *

It would be hard to put together a memorial concert for Charlie Gillett; far too many different styles of music would be involved and too many grateful musicians would demand to take part. It would have to be a three-day festival, really. Which actually isn’t such a bad idea.

Some years ago, Charlie suffered an unusual malady that attacked his immune system. The steroids prescribed confined him to a wheelchair and made his face puff up into a smiling moon. I say smiling because nothing fazed Charlie. Whatever torments he may have endured when the outside world wasn’t looking, one of many remarkable things about Charlie was his cheerful equanimity. He was positive, inexorable, curious about music of all kinds and I can’t think of anyone who wasn’t convinced Charlie was a great guy. Typical of Charlie is that here was someone who probably knew more about football (by which we mean soccer, Yanks) than any of us, yet he seldom took part in the ‘did you see that Arsenal goal on tv, yesterday?’ banter. Charlie didn’t watch much football, he just played it every weekend. That was the hardest thing about his affliction, giving up the weekly match; but he fought through, recovered completely and started playing again, often the oldest guy on the pitch but one of the quickest.

I played ‘Ping Pong’ with Charlie once. By that, I don’t mean miniature plastic tennis, I mean Charlie’s rich and delightful radio game where guests bring a bunch of their favourite records and Charlie passes the baton back and forth – ‘you play one, then I’ll play something in response.’ It was a disc jockey’s version of ‘whisper down the lane’ and it could start in Memphis and end in Okinawa. I suspect that aside from Charlie’s vision that it would make brilliant radio, the real motive was that he discovered so much new music that way.

As the radio outlets for decent music shrank over the years, Charlie’s ears came under more and more pressure. Getting a play on his shows on the BBC World Service, Radio 3 or BBC London meant a valuable shard of exposure. One of the side benefits of giving up running my label in 2001 was I no longer needed to keep up with new releases and could retreat crankily to my vinyl, leafing quickly through the reviews in newspapers and magazines. But Charlie kept listening; every year, not only would he fill the airwaves with new artists from every corner of the globe, but he’d put out a compilation of his favourites, most from small companies. Charlie was a born entrepreneur and knew what it felt like to run an indy label.

Many were closer to Charlie than I was and many will write more thoroughly about his books, his radio shows and his generous gestures to so many. But I can say that the calm pillar around which much of the World and Roots Music scene in Britain revolved has been removed with his untimely death. It was comforting knowing Charlie was there and many of us gauged our commitment to music and the community surrounding it by keeping an eye on him. No one competed with Charlie; he didn’t take up anyone else’s space, he expanded yours as he created his own. He glowed so brightly we’re all a bit in the dark now.

* * *

Over the past year, there have been a further six sad and very English funerals. Each honoured someone I have known for most of the years I have lived in London.

* * *

I met Robert Kirby against my better judgment over forty years ago. I was so convinced of Nick Drake’s monumental talent and potential that the idea of hiring an amateur fellow-student of his at Cambridge as our arranger seemed unwise. But the professional we tried didn’t work out and un-assertive Nick was startlingly confident about Kirby. When we met, I found him delightful, full of confidence and affection for Nick and his music. I’ll quote from White Bicycles on our first session together:

“They started with a song I hadn’t heard because Nick didn’t play it on the guitar. As John (Wood, the engineer) isolated the sound of each instrument, adjusting the mic position or the equalization, I could barely contain my impatience to hear the full sextet. The individual lines were tantalizing, unusual and strong. When at last John opened all the channels and we heard Robert’s full arrangement of ‘Way to Blue’, I almost wept with joy and relief.”

Working with Nick was a pleasure to begin with because his music was so rich and because underneath Nick’s shyness was a highly intelligent and skilled musician. But having both John Wood and Robert on board raised the experience to another level. It is a rare privilege to be part of a team of such talented and dedicated individuals without an iota of ego-driven dissent. We might disagree, but there was never any static; we were all moving passionately in the same direction. The two albums the four of us made together are among my most enjoyable and proudest professional achievements.

I believe Robert’s arrangements for Nick had a huge effect on the musical landscape. Not at first, of course, because hardly anyone heard them until years later. Robert’s opportunities to work were limited – his style was a difficult fit with the ‘70s. Eventually he took a ‘day job’ in market research and music became a hobby. My reconnection with him in recent years coincided with such an increased respect and demand for his work that he was able to commit himself full time to music.

It would be wrong to call Robert ebullient – he had an English reserve about him, but his joyful and delighted take on life was impossible to ignore or fail to be affected by. The musicians we assembled for the Way To Blue concert in Birmingham last May all adored working with Robert. His commitment to young musicians and his love for Nick’s music endowed that concert with an extra dimension that elevated singers, players and audience. We were all looking forward to more such concerts with him when his heart failed last October.

He was buried in a family plot behind a village church in Norfolk. His arrangements sounded glorious in our January concerts. His influence has been heard more and more as years went by, but no one ever sounded like him. His sensibility remained unique and audiences will continue to be entranced by his arrangements whenever and wherever we present Nick’s music.

* * *

No sooner had I returned from Robert Kirby’s funeral than I learned of the death of another friend. I suppose that is what happens when you get to my age, but the fact that everyone experiences these losses later in life doesn’t make it any easier. Many of you are familiar with the work of the first three subjects of this newsletter but few of you know of Julian Hope, whose death at 59 was terribly cruel and sudden.

Julian was the grandson of Somerset Maugham and for many years we lived near each other and played tennis from time to time. I knew that he was managing the Maugham Estate and had been instrumental in the adaptation of his grandfather’s work for stage and screen. I was also aware of his background as a conductor and his love for opera, but our stimulating conversations were always aesthetic rather than practical.

That all changed the day he asked if I could help him get in touch with Caetano Veloso’s office. I had worked with Caetano on the Virginia Rodrigues cds for Hannibal, so I asked what he needed. It turned out Caetano’s management represented the estate of Vinicius de Moraes, one of Brazil’s great poets and author of Black Orpheus. The upshot was that Julian and I became partners in a project to combine the film and stage scores for de Moraes’ Black Orpheus into a concert production. Our timing was bad. The creators of The Lion King chose that moment to propose developing a Broadway version of Orpheus and the rights slipped from our grasp.

Julian knew so much; mention any composer, performer, film-maker, opera singer, writer – Julian could quietly impart the most astute and erudite insights. I moved away from his neighbourhood and an eye problem made me give up tennis, but we never stopped talking of other ideas we might do together. A few weeks before his death, he joined me and another friend to watch Murnau’s pioneering film of the South Pacific, Tabu. Julian knew everything about the background of the film, about Murnau’s fateful trip to Hollywood in the early ‘30s and tragic death. It was a typically rich, enjoyable and thought-provoking evening with one of the best-educated (in the best sense of those words) people I ever met. I had heard he was ill but didn’t realize how grave it was. Two weeks later, he was gone. His funeral was full of wonderful music, performed by his many friends from the classical music world.

* * *

Almost a year ago, John Michell died. He was best known for his books on stone-circles, ley-lines, crop circles and other such phenomena. For the non-English among you, ley-lines are die-straight magnetic paths across the landscape that mysteriously connect hundreds of pre-historic monuments such as Stonehenge, Glastonbury etc. I first met John when he donated his basement as headquarters for the London Free School in 1965. Across the street was the All-Saints Anglican Church where John’s funeral took place. In 1966, we used the church hall there for the fund-raising shows that marked Pink Floyd’s debut on the London underground scene.

The Guardian published a letter from me as an addendum to his obituary. 

Dear Guardian,

Your obituary of John Michell treated his writings about Ley-lines and the operation of magnetic fields upon pre-historic travel and communication as an endearing eccentricity. I am not qualified to refute this view, but feel compelled to report on a day spent in Michell’s company in 1968.

I mentioned to him that I was driving to Pembrokeshire that weekend with Robin Williamson & Licorice McKechnie of the Incredible String Band. John asked if he could get a lift as far as a friend’s house in the Welsh Borders, so four of us set out on a beautiful cloudless summer Saturday. John came equipped with a compass and some Geological Survey maps and asked if we would be interested in helping him conduct an experiment in the countryside around Avebury (home of one of England’s most remarkable stone circles).

During a fuelling stop, John took out a map of Southern England and drew on it the most important Ley-line, the one connecting Glastonbury Tor (in the SW of England) with Bury St Edmonds (in East Anglia) which passes through a remarkable number of towns named St Michael or St George as well as many ancient places of worship. Getting out his 1-inch map of the Wiltshire Downs, John proposed that we leave the A4 near Ogbourne St George and attempt to follow this Ley-line Trunk Route across the downs towards Avebury.

When we entered the village, John led us to the church, where his map and compass proved beyond a doubt that the Line passed straight down the aisle of the church, dissecting the nave at 90 degrees. We followed a dirt road out onto the Wiltshire Downs, turning into smaller and smaller tracks as we attempted to stick close to the Line. Eventually we parked and continued on foot, compass and map keeping us on track. From the top of a rise, Avebury lay below us. The line we were following cleaved the stone circle below directly in half. More remarkable still was a long barrow (burial mound) placed at right angles to it along the crest of the hill. In the centre of the barrow, exactly where the Line crossed, stood a dolmen (standing stone).

Standing with our backs to the dolmen, we looked west along the Line. At 45 degrees to the left, our eyes could follow an absolutely straight road. When the road turned, the straight line continued along an avenue of trees. At 45 degrees right, the same thing was clear: verges of fields, roads and rows of trees stretching in a die-straight line as far as the eye could see.

John’s explanations for these clearly observable phenomena included the prosaic fact that Romans built roads along existing tracks, Anglo-Saxon wagons followed suit as did property boundaries and the 20th century highway builders who referred to long stretches of the ‘old straight track’ as “the A5” or “the A1”. That afternoon, and, I confess, to this day, John’s explanation for the geometric string of St Michaels and St Georges seemed almost as plausible. Those names indicate ‘dragon-slayers’ and saints, as we know, often originate in pre-Christian legend and mythology. The ancient Celtic word for dragon, he said, was derived from root words meaning ‘fiery, flying, coiled serpent’. If you were an Ancient Celt, how else would you describe a flying saucer? And how else would UFOs travel around our planet except by following magnetic paths?  (Let me declare at this point that at age 15 I saw a flying saucer in Puerto Rico. It was observed by thousands and made the front page of the San Juan daily paper.)

Whenever I met John, I thought of that afternoon and those lines stretching across the countryside to the horizon. And I wondered if he mightn’t have been closer to a profound understanding of our world than are the rest of us.

Joe Boyd

London

* * *

Those Powis Square shows by Pink Floyd led directly to my starting the UFO club with John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins. Once we were up and running, we decided to commission a poster in a suitably psychedelic style. My friend Nigel Waymouth was running the shop “Granny Takes A Trip” and had designed the shop’s brilliant front window as well as all other related graphics; I felt he should be the one to create the poster. Hoppy, however, had an artist he liked who had done design work for the International Times. True to the spirit of the times, our solution was to invite them to design it together. They immediately set about creating the gold, peppermint-stripe UFO poster that was the centrepiece of the ‘60s poster exhibition a few years back at the Victoria and Albert Museum and went on to create dozens of posters, the originals of which fetch huge prices at art auctions and are constantly utilized to evoke the spirit of London 1967.

The other artist was Michael English who died last autumn. After the last of his “Hapshash & the Coloured Coat” collaborations with Nigel, he went on to a successful career as a painter and designer. Michael was a warm and engaging guy of whom I wish I had seen more over of the years. A worn copy of the gold-and-candystripe UFO poster greets me in my hallway each morning. He and Nigel stood at least toe-to-toe with the great San Francisco poster artists of the era, creating a body of work that transcends its time.

* * *

Since the publication of White Bicycles, I have been working on another one about the World Music phenomenon. During these recent years, I have become more aware of a parallel movement consisting of individuals and groups proposing a re-orientation of how we feed ourselves and our planet. My father’s favourite maxims concerned the compatibility of aesthetics and pragmatics – and World Music followers and food revolutionaries share a vision in which things that taste and sound wonderful also have a good effect on our environment. (No, I won’t take up space here defending that thesis – you’ll have wait for the book!) As Charlie Gillett is a hero of the World Music movement, Rose Gray, who died recently, can claim a place in the Food pantheon.

I knew Rose before she became the co-founder with Ruth Rodgers of the River Café and co-author of the River Café cookbooks. Our paths crossed only occasionally in recent years, but she never failed to be warm and gracious whenever we met. Everyone who knew her or worked with her has similar reports. Trips to the River Café on special occasions confirmed her remarkable culinary skills. I have since come to appreciate how much Rose and Ruth’s insistence on sourcing food locally and seasonally means to our planet, more even than sourcing our music that way! We’ve lost a noble warrior in one of the fundamental causes of our time.

* * *

Fellow collectors have always held a special place in my heart and in the late Hercules Bellville, I recognized a fellow obsessive with a completely individual taste and approach. Hercules’ name was rarely forgotten once heard, but he avoided limelight or credit. He worked for 40 years in the film industry, mostly behind the scenes with directors like Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci and Michaelangelo Antonioni. (It is his hands scarily breaking through the wall in Repulsion.) There are warm and thorough obituaries online from the Guardian and Independent and many knew him better than I did, but from our first meeting in the early ‘70s, I relished talking with him about recordings he had discovered or books found in dusty out-of-the-way shops.

He was as eccentric as anyone with such a name should be, calling in advance of coming to dinner to ensure I had an interesting beer in the fridge – he wouldn’t drink wine. Perhaps the fruit of the hops inspired him to insist that I purchase Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job And Shove It” so that I could enjoy the wonderful beer-centric b-side “Colorado Kool-Aid”. Conversation with Hercules was an adventure from which you emerged wiser.

* * *

I end this litany of loss on a brief encounter with someone who lived to an advanced age and was able to look back with satisfaction on a life well-lived and accomplishments widely recognized and honoured. He was not a friend, but a hero whose hand I had the honour to shake one afternoon three years ago in Memphis, Tennessee.

My arrival there for a book-reading at the Folk Alliance conference coincided with the onset of a miserable cold. I got through the reading, then reluctantly kept a date with local journalist Andrea Lisle, who had interviewed me in advance by phone and promised to take me for a ribs lunch. After an agreeably authentic meal, she proposed a visit to Sun Studios. I was feeling tired and grumpy: “no, that’s just a museum now, not a real studio”, I said.

“How about Stax?”

“Nah – I read somewhere the original building’s been torn down and re-built!”

Determined to stimulate my interest in her local heritage – and cheer me up –  she finally pulled out her hole card: “Maybe Willie’ll be over at Hi Studios this afternoon”. Now you’re talking, I said.

We parked in the middle of a run-down housing project, with boarded up buildings and garbage piling up under the utility poles and entered a non-descript former movie theatre – the hallowed building where Al Green and Ann Peebles made all those great records in the 1970s. Willie Mitchell and his son Boo were sitting in the reception area. We chatted for a while; when I told Willie about seeing the Hi Review in LA in the early ‘70s, he cursed and said “I was so mad that night! Ann had been drinking! And the band played terrible.” I remember a magic evening, of course, but Willie had higher standards.

Boo took us into the studio. It had an incredible acoustic – the sound just popped off the walls. A drum kit was set up where it had clearly remained for forty years. Al Green’s vocal mic was in the sweet spot; where the carpet ended and the cement floor began were the horn mics. It wasn’t a versatile room – it had been perfect for that Willie Mitchell sound in the ‘70s and it remained so these many years later. Clients, some from as far away as Japan or Spain, came looking for that sound and here they found it.

The control room was a 1971 time capsule: no automation, no Pro-Tools, an Ampex 24-track 2” tape recorder, tape boxes, trol room was a 1971 time capsule: no automation, no Pro-Tools, an Ampex 24-track 2” tape recorder, tape boxes, an echo plate. In the middle of the studio was a stairway to a long-unused doorway halfway up one wall.

“What’s up there?”, I asked Boo.

“Dad got a bit carried away after he had all those hits in the ‘70s and built a quadraphonic mixing room up there. I don’t think anyone’s been up there since about 1980!”

When we got back to the reception area, a cheap cd console was playing Al Green singing “I Can’t Stand The Rain”.

 “I never knew he recorded that”, I said.

 “He didn’t until now”, said Willie. “That’s a rough mix for the new record.”

As the sparse vocal-and-rhythm track played, Willie’s left hand toyed with a cheap octave-and-a-half Casio keyboard perched awkwardly on the desk next to the receptionist’s typewriter. Duh-duh, uh-duh-duh – the squeaky little chords coming from the Casio sounded familiar. Horn charts! Willie was figuring out a classic Memphis horn arrangement on a Casio while we chatted in the Hi Studios reception area. I had witnessed the great man casually creating more inimitable music.

Willie Mitchell passed away in January, one more loss to our world this twelvemonth.

Joe Boyd

Three concerts in the coming months will celebrate the legacy of Joe Boyd’s 1960s Witchseason Productions:

(all curated by Joe Boyd)

May 16 in Birmingham Town Hall – "Way To Blue", the music of Nick Drake. A bit more than a tribute concert, Way To Blue will feature performances by Martha Wainwright, Graham Coxon, Beth Orton, Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Boris Grebenchikov and Harper Simon. Kate St John is musical director and Robert Kirby will be on hand to conduct both his original string parts from Nick’s recordings, but some newly written arrangements as well. Legendary bassist Danny Thompson, who played on many of Nick’s recordings will anchor the house band, along with pianist Zoe Rahman, Neil MacColl and Leo Abrahams on guitars and Martyn Barker on drums.

Those who attended the Nick Drake panel at the Barbican 10 years ago will remember our special guest, Robin Frederick. Robin not only busked with Nick during the summer of 1967 in Provence, but she now teaches songwriting in California and can explain exaclty what makes Nick’s music so brilliant. She will take part in the concert and take part with Joe and Robert Kirby in a seminar after the concert. One of the songs performed during the evening will be by Molly Drake, Nick’s mother and Robin will discuss her effect on her son’s music.

On Sunday afternoon (May 17) at 430 in the Town Hall, Joe will share the stage with Robyn Hitchcock. He will tell tales from White Bicycles and Robyn will sing the soundtrack.

July 18 at the Barbican in London will see an all-star reunion of the early formations of Fairport Convention. Material from the first five albums will be performed.

July 19 at the Barbican – the second part of "Witchseason Weekend" will be a tribute to the songs of the Incredible String Band.

More about the latter concerts soon.

“I am still dabbling in the music business as a partner with my old friends and colleagues Catherine Steinmann and Guy Morris in Carthage, a music publishing company. We will send out info from time to time on our composers’ live shows and other news events. If you’d like to opt out of these newsletters but stay connected to my periodic rambling reports, please let us know.

Best  – Joe”

Chango Spasiuk – Brand new album plus tour dates for Argentina’s accordion hero

Accordion master Chango Spasiuk has single-handedly brought about a rebirth of the soulful and seductive dance music of northeastern Argentina known as chamané. ‘One of the great originals of the Latin music scene’, said last Friday’s Guardian in a 4-star review of his new album, Pyandi, out this week on World Village.  Stunning as his album is, Chango is at his best live and his quartet will begin their UK tour this week.  Highlights will include an unmissable London show at the Union Chapel on Saturday 28 February. Chango will follow up with a US tour in March including a date at New York’s Carnegie Hall.  Full tour dates below.

20 Feb 09 UK, Pontadarwe – Pontadarwe Arts Centre

22 Feb 09 UK, Bristol – St George’s 

25 Feb 09 UK, Leeds – The Wardrobe

26 Feb 09 UK, Newcastle – The Sage Gateshead

28 Feb 09 UK, London – Union Chapel

4 Mar 09 UK, Oxford – Wesley Memorial Church

26 Mar 09 USA, Minneapolis – The Cedar Cultural Center

27 Mar 09 USA, New York – Carnegie Hall

3 Apr 09 USA, Boston – Somerville Theater

4 Apr 09 USA, Los Angeles – The Getty

5 Apr 09 USA, Los Angeles – The Getty

7 Apr 09 USA, San Luis Obispo – Grace Church

9 Apr 09 USA, San Francisco – Yoshi’s

Tony Allen signs exclusive recording deal with World Circuit

‘Perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived’ Brian Eno

We are delighted that the legendary Nigerian drummer and co-creator of Afrobeat has signed an exclusive record deal with World Circuit Records, home to, among others, the late Ali Farka Toure, Buena Vista Social Club and Orchestra Baobab. The first album under this agreement (and his first since Tony collaborated with Damon Albarn and Paul Simenon on The Good, The Bad and The Queen) will be ‘Secret Agent’ due for release in June this year. A tour is also planned. World Circuit rarely sign new artists – Grammy Winner Toumani Diabate was the last artist to join their label in 2003.

Meanwhile, a jam-packed Cargo was the place to be on 29 Jan when Tony Allen and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble headed up Red Bull Academy’s Broad Casting event joined by star guests Ty, Baaba Maal Natty, and even Damon Albarn, who made a late appearance on stage. The night rocked. For those who missed it you can hear the concert in full at the Red Bull Radio website.

New album plus London show for Mali’s treasured singer Kassé Mady Diabate

The beautiful voice of Kassé Mady Diabate has made him one of the most treasured Griots in his native Mali. In this exciting double bill at the Barbican Kassé will be performing songs from his new album Mande Djeli Kan which will be released in the UK in March by Wrasse Records.

6 Apr 09 UK, London – Barbican Centre (supporting Orchestra Baobab)

Ivo Papasov tours the UK

Following the critically acclaimed release of Dance Of The Falcon last summer and an outstanding gig at Cargo in London in the autumn, the King of Bulgarian wedding music will return to the UK later this spring to play some key dates.  Ivo is one almighty clarinet virtuoso, whose solos swoop and soar in amongst the frenzied gypsy rhythms and jazz riffs of his magnificent band of gypsy musicians.  His is a live show of huge energy – staggering and uplifting.  No surprise that Frank Zappa said of him: ‘Ivo Papasov’s wedding music, played first thing in the morning, provides thorough and long-lasting attitude adjustment for the busy executive’.  His double bill with Emir Kusterica at the Barbican on May 9th will be a memorable night.

1 May 09 UK, Bristol – St George’s

4 May 09 UK, Brighton – Komedia

5 May 09 UK, Edinburgh – Picture House

6 May 09 UK, Gateshead – Sage Gateshead Hall 2

9 May 09 UK, London – Barbican Centre (with Emir Kusterica’s No Smoking Band)

For further information about any of the above please contact Catherine Steinmann

Tel: 020 7229 3000 Email: catherine@carthagemusic.co.uk

Joe

It’s been a while since my last newsletter, but I hope to take up the slack with colourful tales of far-away places. There’s plenty to report so sit back – this may take a while.

As some of you may recall, I have expressed my fatigue with ‘mixed salad’ world music festivals. I prefer local events that concentrate on the matter at hand – the musical culture of a region. Last autumn’s trip to Rajasthan began my ‘year of festivals’, justifiable as research for my book on World Music, and not unconnected to the fact I was able to wangle invitations to a quartet of great events.

I warmed up for the January trip to the River Niger Festival in Francophone Mali with a Parisian sojourn celebrating the French edition of White Bicycles. I shall now disappoint those who are taken in by my façade of self-effacement by bragging about my week of interviews for press, radio and live television (!) entirely in French! (Highlights on my website.)

A week later, I boarded an Air Ghaddafi flight to Bamako via Libya. The plane was comfortable and on time, the only drawback being the alarming chartreuse colour of the faux-leather seats. A further upside of the trip involved sitting across the aisle from the reassuring blonde mane of Professor Lucy Duran, ethnomusicologist, BBC world music deejay and veteran Bembera-speaking Mali-hand. Following Lucy around like an obedient spaniel is definitely the way to see the country.

A highlight of the first few days in Bamako was a visit to the home of ngoni maestro Bassekou Kouyate for a band rehearsal. Many of you will be aware of Bassekou since his cd Segou Blue (produced by Lucy D) seems to have won all possible awards and he pops up at every festival on the Civilized side of the Atlantic. His band consists of 5 ngoni players, his singing wife, Amy Sacko, and a percussionist. What is an ngoni, you ask? Well for a start it is the grandfather of the banjo (hint to anyone involved with booking American country music festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass or MerleFest – Basekou tore it up on his first visit to the US 20 years ago for a bluegrass banjo festival in Memphis…) Ngonis vary in size, pitch, neck length and number of strings but essentially are hide-covered half-gourds with dowel necks (perfect for bending strings even more sinuously than on a banjo’s flat neck). The group swings like crazy and have managed to strike off in new directions within the confines of traditional Malian music – my ideal of cliché-avoiding modernity.

For years Basekou played with Toumani Diabate  (during which time I had the pleasure of making several records with them) and he often stole the show during Ali Farka Touré’s last tour. He is a man of great presence and charm and a stunning soloist. Having been the primary instrument of the royal courts of West Africa for many centuries before being lately eclipsed by the kora, the ngoni is now making a strong comeback in the 21st.

We tore ourselves away from Bamako and drove down the Niger River (heading counter-intuitively north) to Segou, ancient capital of the Bamana empire, founded in the 17th century. It is a very pleasant river town with a bustling market and plenty of open-air bars and restaurants. The festival stage is located on a barge at the foot of a riverbank amphitheatre. The Duran gang stayed at a riverside art gallery on the edge of town that rents rooms and serves excellent French food in a post-traditional mud-sculpture setting, and the town has other good hotels and rooming houses.

Opening night was a bit worrying, with its over-the-top River Goddess sculptures floating in by torch-light and dodgy ‘interpretive’ dancing salvaged from Alvin Ailey’s trash bin – but I needn’t have worried. Friday, Saturday and Sunday saw some of Mali’s best – Selif Keita, Bassekou, Mangala, Abdoulaye Diabate, Afel Boucom and Neba Solo –play outstanding sets for an almost entirely local audience. The weather was perfect, the beer cold, the African Cup of Nations was on TV during the occasional boring set while the huge river rolled calmly past. We made excursions to ancient earthen mosques and rural ruins that harboured families of mud-cloth artisans and took a pirogue up river for a swim and a cookout on the last day.

Back in Bamako by Wednesday, the Amitié Hotel pool provided respite from the heat while cool evenings inspired walks through the town. Friday is jam session night at the Hogon Club and it is worth examining this phenomenon a bit more closely. Toumani Diabate is Mali’s greatest kora player, now receiving the international acclaim he deserves. (But be sure to buy his older Hannibal recordings before spending your money on the more recent stuff…!) He was away on tour, but the Friday night sessions he initiated almost ten years ago were going strong. A rhythm section sets up in this wonderful outdoor dance hall and singers and soloists come and go all night. Toumani’s great vocalist, Kasse Mady, arrived during the evening and made my night by singing a praise song for me and Lucy Duran and jumping down to the dance floor to embrace us.

Ten years ago, Malian music, like much in Africa, had degenerated into cheap synth imitations diluted by Anglo-Amarican rhythms. Live music had been killed by deejays and recordings had lost their charm. But musicians heard the more traditional cds Mali’s stars made abroad for ‘world music’ labels and during Toumani’s Friday jams started to experiment with a kind of post-modern approach to their roots. Now every time you get in a taxi, koras, balafons and ngonis are blasting from the speaker. Mali’s music is as strong an export these days as it has ever been: the late Ali Farka Touré, Amadou and Mariam, Selif Keita, Toumani Diabate, Oumou Sangare, Rokia Traore, the Rail Band, Tinariwan and Bassekou’s group ‘Ngoni Ba’ have put Mali atop the world music hit parade.

There is also, of course, Northern Mali’s Festival in the Desert every January. But the music there is very different, more Saharan than African, and I am afraid my image of it consists of dozens of French fashion photographers getting their SUVs pulled out of sand dunes by long-suffering Tuaregs and rock stars jamming with local bands. Unfair, I’m sure, but I think you’re better off at the River Niger Festival in 2009.

(Info at www.festivalsegou.org/homepage.htm and help with visas can be found via airvacances@airvacances.net)

So that was two down, two to go: for years I had coveted trips to Fez for the Sacred Music festival in June and Siberia in July for Sayan Ring. Jackpot! – with my book deadline looming, I got invited to both.

The spring had its own musical highlights – Paul Simon’s Graceland reunion in Brooklyn, for a start. It was quite affecting to hear those bass accordion notes that kick off “Boy In The Bubble”, once so exotically Zulu, now iconic and familiar, and to see the crowd leap to its feet as Ladysmith Black Mambazo formed their semi-circle on stage. I admired the respect Simon demonstrated for his musical collaborators back in the ‘80s and it was again evident at BAM. Journalists have memorialized the pub meeting that ‘invented’ the term, but if there were a starting gun for “World Music”, it would have to be Graceland.

Mali was brought back to mind when I returned from to London and caught Vieux Farka Touré at the Jazz Café. He has added a rock edge to his Dad’s music without much compromising its essence. I see the American ‘Jam Band’ circuit in his future – no bad thing! A few days later my old friend Boris Grebenchikov filled the Albert Hall for an entirely Russian concert. While true that Sri Chimnoy’s organization gave away tickets, there was no denying how much expat Russians and Anglophones alike enjoyed the show. Boris’ group Aquarium were the samizdat stars of pre-Glasnost Russia, tapes being copied and passed through hundreds of thousands of hands in those years. In 2007 he brought London a ‘rockist’ band that was starting to show its age but this time he had a cracking group of Irish, Americans, Russians – plus a Polish woman playing Oriental bowed instruments – that pleased everyone, even me!

A couple of nights later I went to a book launch for Clive Palmer’s biography. I realize there are a few out there who might not recognize the name: he was half the ‘Robin & Clive’ duo that morphed into the Incredible String Band when Mike Heron joined. Clive wandered off on his travels when I made it clear how much I loved the songs Robin and Mike were composing. I hadn’t seen him since 1966 when we took the cover photo for the first ISB album at Harold Moore’s Record shop in London (still there on Gt Marlborough St – an institution deserving of all Londoners’ amazon-avoiding support!). Having greeted Clive as I entered, I was carried downstream by crowds in the tiny 12-Bar Club and half an hour later found myself standing next to him at the bar. He looked like an old man in the Sixties and now is one so he has hardly changed at all; we picked up where our last conversation left off 40 years ago. He and some friends from Cornwall played a lovely set of rags and reels; he still picks a mean banjo and is as much his own man as he always was.

White Bicycles’ Dutch edition was launched the following week so I went to Brussels and Amsterdam for press, radio and a couple of readings. The nuances of cultural nationalism are always interesting, so I was fascinated to discover how snobbish the Dutch are about the Flemings (my publisher being from Antwerp). “Surprisingly good translation – not too many Flemishisms” said one Dutch journalist!

Back in London, Orchestra Baobab reminded a heaving dance-floor in Shepherd’s Bush how much better they are these days than their old Dakar night-club rival Youssu ‘Ndour – but no doubt you’ve heard me bang on about that comparison before. Sorry, I just can’t help myself!

A few days later it was off to Fez, a city I last visited in the 70s. In those days, when I imagined I had more disposable income than I know I do today (and when exotic hotels were still comparatively cheap), I had a room in the luxurious Palais Jamai on the ancient walls looking out over the old city. Sunrise blasted me awake and I listened to the noise of a huge urban sprawl starting its day. It was as loud as any city should be but something was missing. After a few minutes, I figured it out – the engine! The noise comprised shouting, wheels grinding, donkeys braying, leather slapping on stone, carts negotiating cobbled streets – but no motors! Thirty years later, it hasn’t changed much, just a bit cleaner. In that setting, it is hard for a festival to put a foot wrong.

I’m not certain I would be so positive about the festival if all concerts had been held in a soul-less arena. The immense and beautiful oak tree in the courtyard location of the afternoon concerts certainly enhanced my memories of events there, as did the beautiful courtyard and garden locations of the evening and midnight shows. I wrote a piece about it all for the Guardian Review, which some of you may have seen (www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/28/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview17) so I won’t go over old ground here. Suffice it to say that Fez is a wonderful city and its annual festival is a great thing, albeit not quite what it evidently once was.

(www.fesfestival.com)

One memory of Fez I didn’t cover for the Guardian was my meeting with two Moroccan woman journalists from Casablanca. If there were ever two sophisticated, worldly, modern Moroccan women, these were they. They took me to a restaurant deep inside the Medina so I could experience a real p’stilla, the pigeon pie for which Fez is renowned. We talked about music, politics and culture and found ourselves mostly in agreement: Bush bad, traditional music good! But when I asked whether they had husbands and children awaiting them back in Casablanca, I got bitter laughs. One of them described sunning face down by the hotel pool that afternoon and undoing the strap of her bikini top to get an even tan. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a (male) fellow journalist snapping a photo with his cell phone camera. She knew this ‘scandalous’ shot would virus around her office within hours – and this from an educated and ‘modern’ Moroccan guy! With men of such primitive mentalities, she asked, how could she be expected to marry one?

Her friend said that some younger girls in Casablanca were experimenting with sex and ‘dating’, but it was like Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism: no one knew how to handle the freedom that fell into their laps and everyone was disturbed and confused. These are beautiful and intelligent women of around 30 who felt themselves caught between two worlds and saw almost no possibility of ever marrying or even falling in love. Very sad!

Memories of 2006’s trip to Addis Ababa were brought back to me in London when the Barbican presented Ethiopiques at the end of June. Francis Falceto is the genius behind this series; he first heard an Ethiopian record in the early ‘80s and has been regularly visiting the only un-colonized country in Africa ever since. He has tracked down old reel-to-reel master tapes in the back of Ethiopian garages and brought portable recording gear to Addis Ababa venues, putting together the 24-volume Ethiopiques cult series one album at a time. Mahmoud Ahmed is the star of the Ethiopian revival, a commanding presence and a powerful singer, one of whose records used to be in the Hannibal catalogue. The English concerts featured the American big-band Either/Orchestra, a bunch of Berklee-trained jazzers obsessed with Ethiopian music. Why not an Ethiopian band to accompany these great singers? Because synthesizers and drum machines so dominate Addis Ababa nightlife that Francis despairs of putting together an adequate backing band there. If you haven’t heard this music, start with one of the first five volumes or the compilation now available in the UK.

In early July, I set off for Russia and the Wild East. Moscow has become the world’s most expensive city and the changes since my first visit in 1990 are astounding. Muscovites have made the transition from comrades to consumers with ease; they stride in and out of expensive shops with the same strut that the Russian army showed invading Georgia! (OK, that’s a bit of a stretch, but it is hard not to notice today’s Putin-esque confidence in contrast to the ashamed insecurity of the Yeltsin era.)

Moscow is home to my friend Sasha Cheparukhin, who started as an environmentalist and evolved via benefit concerts into one of Russia’s leading music promoters. During our pre-Siberia stopover, he filled a Moscow park – in the rain, mind you – for the first visit by Buena Vista Social Club and some very high-class Russian salsa dancing was evident beneath the umbrellas. Other highlights prior to setting out for Shoshenskoye (Lenin’s Place of Exile) included beautiful harmonies at an evening service in the Novospassky Monastery in Moscow and a preview of Central Asian throat singing at a performance by Hun Huur Tu in an 18th century Italianate hall adjoining the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Sasha was charged with inviting foreign ‘experts’ like myself as well as non-Siberian musicians, mostly Russian. A motley crew of liggers and musos assembled at Vnokovo Airport for the flight east – four and a half hours across four time zones – which only took us half way from Moscow to the Pacific! A morning glance from the window of our Vladivostock Airlines jet found a carpet of intensely green hilly pastureland traversed with rivers. The bus from Abakan airport to Shoshenskoye passed through beautiful rolling country quite unlike any image one might have of Siberia. Our destination was hundreds of miles Southwest of Irkutsk in the autonomous region of Khakhasia, close to Tuva and not far from the Mongolian border – and a long way from the endless forests of the Trans-Siberian Express.

Sayan Ring is free; the crowd is mostly local with visitors from adjacent Siberian regions camping in fields around the ‘Stadion’ (which turns out to be a running track with a few small bleachers in a clearing in the woods). But any notion that this is an amateurish event is soon dispelled. All performers undergo exhaustive sound checks, the PA mix is generally excellent and groups come on and off stage with brisk precision. There is complementary food and drink for performers and ‘VIPs’, balloons for kids and food and beer stalls in clusters nearby.

The music is a rich mix of Asian throat-singing, Russian choirs and smaller groups, solo performers, Russian folk-rock bands and even a Soviet-style regional ‘folk ensemble’ from Krasnoyarsk. My favourite discoveries were the Irkutsk Authentic Music Society, a trio who sang songs collected from a valley doomed by a dam, once home to the oldest Russian community in Siberia; the remarkable Albina and her trio of Yakut singers and jew’s harp virtuosi; Alash, a Tuvan quintet who throat-sang in weird and wonderful harmonies; Natalya Neliobova, a half-gypsy singer from Tomsk; and Khool Zhingel, a Tatar/Russian quartet from Kazan. Special guests included Sergei Starostin and Inna Zhalana, two of Russian folk music’s pioneering artists.

The long set by the Krasnoyarsk Ensemble was particularly fascinating. Very theatrical, it nonetheless signalled a radical shift away from past styles. Igor Moiseyev, who invented the ‘State Ensemble’ aesthetic, detested ‘authentic’ folk music and felt the ‘folk’ needed uplifting with ‘professional’ music that was bright and happy instead of gloomy and old-fashioned. All Soviet and Eastern European ensembles (except the Bulgarians) slavishly followed his kitsch lead. But this outfit, though still sporting ‘happy villager’ outfits and ‘jolly’ attitudes, was trying to sound authentic! They even had a go at Tuvan throat-singing and did a good impression of the ‘head voice’ typical of village women across Russia. Authenticity is the new Black!

http://festival.sayanring.ru  – (but it’s in Russian. There should be more info on-line in coming months.)

Sasha had arranged a trip to Tuva for interested musicians and guests. My hand was up! Nights in a yurt beside the Yenesei River; dinner with the remarkable Albert Kuvezin, rocking throat-singer of the group Yat-Kha (whom I first met 18 years earlier when I was a juror at the Asia Dausy festival in Kazakhstan); a visit to the great museum and ‘centre of Asia’ monument in Khyzyl; great vistas of the Tuvan mountains – all unforgettable.

On a somber note, I would like to report meeting the heroic Davlat Khudonazar, a Tadjik film-maker and political activist. Now based in Moscow, he works with Tadjik and other Asian communities to ameliorate their suffering at the hands of Russian skinheads, policemen and construction bosses. He arranges the return to Tadjikistan of an average of a coffin every three weeks as a result of mostly un-investigated and un-mourned deaths of Central Asians in Moscow. Some Russians I discussed this with shocked me by suggesting a nostalgia for the old Soviet Union. I bristled, thinking they were proposing that Russia dominate the ‘near abroad’ once more. Not at all, they said; they remembered a time when Tadjiks, for example, weren’t ‘foreigners’ in Moscow, but fellow-Soviets. Like liberal Yugoslavs who detest the racist nationalism that followed the break-up of their country, they remembered a time when the government was made up of Georgians, Ukrainians and Uzbeks as well as Russians. There is certainly a bit of rose-coloured spectacles in this vision, but there is an important point to ponder. Giving every ‘national’ group their own state creates as many problems as it solves, as Ossetia, Georgia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Cyprus, the Basque region, Ulster, Israel and Palestine can bear witness.

My favourite memory of the trip was watching a crowd of ordinary Russian Siberians knowledgeably cheering on Tuvan throat singers at Sayan Ring. They seemed to know the good from the bad and to be proud of their local Asiatic culture. As I watched, I chewed on a skewer of the best shashlik Shushenskoye had to offer from a stall run by a Palestinian educated in Moscow on a PLO scholarship in the ‘60s who had married a Siberian girl and loved Khakhasia almost as much as he loved his Palestinian homeland.

I am making an effort to curtail my wanderlust for a while until I get the book finished. Hasta la proxima.

Joe

Dear Mailing List,

(These news letters seem to get longer and longer. But enough of you say you enjoy them, so I’m not going to edit too severely.)

Plenty of travel and music to report since my last newsletter. The journeys began at the end of September when I went back to my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey for my father’s memorial service. Local friends of his had worried that so many of his friends were dead or moved away we might not get much of a turnout, but there were about 70 people in the meeting room of Princeton Community Library. My brother and I and others shared memories, some of Dad’s as yet unpublished book on the global economy from a local perspective was read, slides were projected and, after I described my father teaching me double-entry book-keeping by comparing it to the elegance of a Bach fugue, SuzanneFremon – who had studied piano with my grandmother – played a Bach fugue and some Schubert. All in all a very satisfying event.

From there I flew to California for two evenings built around the release of new Nick Drake material and screenings of the film “A Skin Too Few”. Sometime in the late ‘90s, the BBC approached Gabrielle Drake and me about making a documentary on Nick. I was impressed with their young director and the production unit was one of the best in the BBC, so the project went ahead. While that was being shot (working around the fact that there is no footage of Nick performing), some Dutch guys started pestering me about a film they were making on the same subject for Dutch tv. In the cause of spreading the word about Nick’s music to the Continent, I took part in their film as well, despite the fact that I found their methods a bit off-putting. The BBC film was eventually aired and was very disappointing. A few months later, I attended a screening of the Dutch film with very low expectations. Naturally, it was brilliant.

This is the film that was shown in San Francisco and Los Angeles at the beginning of October. In Los Angeles, Gabrielle Drake and I were upstaged by Robin Frederick, who did her brilliant de-construction of a couple of Nick’s songs. She plays and sings, not attempting to put across a performance, but in order to demonstrate what Nick is up to with his complex harmonies, melodies, rhythms and lyrics. After listening to Robin, you gain a new understanding of why Nick’s music has endured.

In San Francisco, I stumbled across a free festival in Golden Gate Park called “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass”. What an amazing thing! A local millionaire gives it free to the city every autumn – 5 stages, free entrance to everyone and stars from T-Bone Burnett to Teddy Thompson and Emmy Lou Harris to Boz Scaggs and Elvis Costello plus lots of roots country artists performing across three days.

Next was a reading tour of Germany with Geoff Muldaur. It was, if I do say so myself, not a bad show. Andreas Schaefler from Kunstmann Verlag- my German publisher – read selections from my book in German, I told tales of the Sixties and answered questions in English and Geoff performed songs related to the book. Seven cities in eight days; it was nice to have a tour manager, someone else to hold the tickets and tell me when to be downstairs and ready to go.

At 5am on the morning after the final stop in Dusseldorf, I grabbed a taxi to the airport and flew to India.

My visit to the Rajasthan International Folk Festival began a year earlier, when I was invited to attend the Jaipur Arts Festival. A condition of my invitation was that I write about it for an English paper. Preparing my pitch for the Guardian, I had a close look at the festival website. Evening events included collaborations between Rajasthani musicians and an ex-member of the Thompson Twins and village dancers in a piece directed by an Italian choreographer. I suggested to the Jaipur press attaché that perhaps it would be better if I didn’t come; in all probability, my piece would take the piss out of such things and I’d feel bad for having accepted their air tickets and hotels. She was appreciative of my frankness and agreed it might be better if I came ‘another time’. But she couldn’t resist adding a comment that while she understood my ‘purism’, I ought to appreciate that they were concerned with making international contacts for their local musicians and had to do what was best for them. I countered by saying that I was the last person to be against promoting traditional musicians on the international stage. The difference was that I believed that ill-advised ‘fusions’ were far from being constructive, that most successful international touring ‘world music’ artists are pretty true to their traditions and ‘Western’ audiences are far more responsive to the ‘real thing’.

A day later, I got an email from John Singh, director of the festival, saying he agreed with me completely and proposed meeting up when he was next in London. Those fusions, he explained when we met, were the strings attached to funds dangled by cultural consulates from places like New Zealand or Italy. But he then explained about the RIFF festival in Jodhpur that would take place for the first time in October; it would focus almost entirely on village musical traditions. Why didn’t I come to that instead?

Thus I found myself in a taxi, climbing a twisting road through the ancient Rajput city of Jodhpur. When we broke clear of the streets crowded with cows, ‘tuk-tuk’ rickshaws and pedestrians, a gigantic stone fort loomed before us on a crag above the city. There were turbaned guards at the gates, trays of cocktails for the opening night celebrations on the cobbled street inside the fort and musicians serenading the guests at every turn as we slowly wound our way via courtyards and spectacular parapets towards the top. The banquet was a star-studded affair – my table was graced by William Dalrymple, foremost chronicler of Moghul India and Mick Jagger, a genuine Indian music buff and an old friend of the Maharajah’s. After goat tikka and delicious vegetable curries, everyone repaired to a courtyard surrounded by filigree-carved stone windows and topped by a full moon for a concert of Indian classical singers and musicians celebrating Rajasthani folk songs.

For the next three days, afternoons were spent under a canopy in a beautiful garden listening to unamplified traditional musicians from the Langa and Manganiyar communities performing ancient songs about Saints and Gods, dressed in beautiful costumes, occasionally unfurling huge scrolls with painted accounts of the deeds of heroes who defended low-caste cattle against the predations of Rajputs. There was an ethno-musicologist on hand to explain the meaning of the songs. What a wonderful way to pass an afternoon!

At dusk, the festival moved along the road to a cement plinth overlooking the fort where Sufi devotional songs helped the sun lower itself below the horizon, turning the fort and the ‘blue city’ of Jodhpur brilliant shades of rose and orange in the process. In the evening, there were more concerts in huge courtyards in the fort, with food and drink for sale along the ramparts looking down on the old city, where, one evening, you could hear the sound of a wedding and a brass band hundreds of meters below our eyrie. For anyone looking for a great musical adventure next autumn, google Rajasthan International Folk Festival and start booking your trip now. For those of you in the World Music business, the only problem is that it will probably take place once again on WOMEX weekend.

When the festival was finished, John Singh had plans for me. I might well have gone to the festival in any case, but I had a feeling that what John was up to in Rajasthan would make good material for my book on World Music. On Sunday afternoon in the garden, I sought him out and pointed to a family that had intrigued me all weekend: a bearded patriarch who liked to shake his ass and dance while waving his giant tambura, a clever-looking daughter who sang beautifully and played the harmonium and a veiled daughter-in-law who sang even better. When I asked if he would translate while I interviewed them, he said I needn’t bother. “We’re visiting their home on Tuesday on the way to Jaipur.”

Monday started with a dawn concert of Sufi devotional songs on the plinth and a Rajasthani breakfast and ended with a small private concert in the country home of the late Komal Kothari, the ethnomusicoligist who pioneered the documentation of Rajasthani folk culture. Many of the musicians who had gathered for the festival were there, but that evening they performed a completely different repertoire. Kothari always hated the harmonium, a ‘modern’ 19th century invention which, with its steady drone, made singers lazier than they had been when they accompanied themselves on one of the many varieties of sarangi found in Rajasthan. The musicians played for the audience of other musicians and musicologists (and ringers such as myself), reaching back to remember the songs they and their families first performed for Kothari when he came to their villages forty years ago. No microphones, the music reflecting off the stone floor and the adobe walls, singers taking turns for almost three hours and a delicious vegetarian meal under the moon at the end.

Tuesday we drove through the land of the Bishnoi, the original tree-huggers. In 1730, the Maharajah of Jodhpur ordered the felling of Khejri trees, a marvellous plant that provides animal fodder, housing material and medicines and flourishes in the Rajasthan desert. Women and children from the Bishnoi community stood between the axes and the trees and hundreds were killed. Eventually, the maharajah relented and the trees have been protected ever since.

By midday, we were in Jaitaran, at the simple house of the family of Sajjan Dass and his daughters. We heard how their musical life had deteriorated through the disinterest of traditional patrons who had stopped paying them decent fees for the all-night performance of the devotional songs that had been their stock in trade. Since John Singh had invited them to perform at the Jaipur festival, however, their lives have completely changed. They have been in the newspapers and even on television. Local families are paying good fees for all night ceremonies again. They have set up a village teashop and bought an old car that Sajjan is trying to repair. They worship Singh as a kind of deity.

In Jaipur, we stayed with John and his wife Faith at the Anokhi compound outside of town. What John is doing for music, he and Faith have already done for the tradition of hand-block printing. Female readers may have heard of Anokhi; in the ‘70s you could find their clothes at Liberty and Monsoon in London and when fashions shifted, they made home furnishings. Now they have a chain of stores in India, where the middle-classes are beginning to appreciate the traditional crafts of their country. Their land was reclaimed from waste ground and is now full of trees, birds, an organic farm, houses built from traditional materials in pure Rajasthani style and the Anokhi headquarters, cooled with water and fans, where the 300 or so employees all gaze directly from workstations onto greenery. It is a magical, contented and industrious place. The Singhs are also involved in saving tigers, making life better for working elephants, preserving the architecture of Jaipur and have started a multi-caste progressive school. You could tell the RIFF had real class and spirit and in Jaipur I understood where it came from.

I won’t go on and on about how beneficial traditional music, crafts and architecture are for a culture. You’ll have wait and read my book for that. But I do highly recommend the Rajasthan International Folk Festival in Jodhpur. Maybe I’ll see you there next year. (http://www.jodhpurfolkfestival.org/). Please visit my website for photos of last year’s event. (http://www.joeboyd.co.uk/photos.html)

Back in the ‘West’, the December highlight was a trip to New York to receive a “Deems Taylor” award from ASCAP for White Bicycles. The week began with a visit to Prairie Home Companion at Town Hall to see Geoff Muldaur perform three pieces he had arranged for vocal and brass ensemble. One was a song by his old Woodstock friend Geoff Gutcheon called “(Don’t Want to Have A) Slow Death” written after he watched his mother’s extended suffering in her old age. Geoff says he’s never had such a response to a song! (Geoff’s website is www.geoffmuldaur.com). For non-Americans, Prairie Home is a regular radio (and occasionally tv) broadcast by the monologist and writer Garrison Keillor with plenty of music amid the tales of Lake Wobegon. Keillor is pretty impressive, standing on stage in a natty suit and tie and bright red trainers (‘sneakers’ to us Yanks) and telling wry tales without script or prompter. Geoff assures me they’re different every night. The other singer that night was Odetta – who I confess I never liked back in her ‘60s heyday, but age and illness have taken the oomph out of her operatic contralto and the result was far more soulful and satisfying to my ear.

The ASCAP event was impressive. The small auditorium in the new ‘Jazz At Lincoln Center’ complex in Columbus Circle is steeply raked and at first glance had what seemed like a huge bank of tv monitors behind the stage. My misapprehension was soon corrected: it is, in fact, a high wall of windows looking out onto Central Park and 59th St: quite a spectacular setting. Awards went to books, magazine articles, liner notes and documentaries and I was proud to be in such company. Highlights of the evening included Lorraine Gordon, author of a book about her life in music. She keeps the New York jazz club flame alight at the Village Vanguard and when accepting, pretended to read “troops out of Iraq, now!” off the plaque. The only bigger ovation was for Les Paul, who, at 92, still performs regularly. He told a great story about showing up unannounced to audition for Paul Whiteman in the late 1930s, which is how he got his start. No myspace.com in those days….

I was counting on a quiet holiday fortnight to make more progress on my ‘difficult second book’, but an energy-sapping flu has set me back. I’m currently in Paris for the launch of the French version of White Bicycles, then I’ll try to resist further promotion opportunities in favour hard work on the World Music book.

Happy New Year to all.

Dear Mailing List,

Here’s my rentrée letter – a French expression coined when everyone went on holiday at the same time and returned together for back-to-work/school. A Fairport Convention record I once produced was finished about this time of year and duly entitled “What We Did On Our Holidays”.

My summer was eventful. Musical highlights included Ornette Coleman at the Festival Hall with his 3 (!) bass players, guitarist and drummer. A very pleasant surprise involved going to Somerset for a friend’s party for her 2 sons, where the live music turned out to be Little George. Someone had given me a Little George cd a few months earlier and when I listened to it, I tried to figure out how I could have missed a Chicago or Detroit soul band from the Sixties that was so good. When consulted, the back of the cd informed me that Little George was a Greek guy from Camden Town and there he was in a tent in Somerset playing for 20-somethings who seemed to enjoy him almost as much as the old codgers like myself who gathered around the bandstand.

Another highlight was mini-genius Prince at the O2 Arena. We had tickets already, but the discovery that Will Rast, my second cousin, was playing keyboards with Myra, an American singer opening for him transformed the evening. The result was a box-seat view of most of Prince’s show, a backstage lig and an after-hours jam. Prince doesn’t need me to wax ecstatic about him, but I will anyway. His arena show is good of its kind but overshadowed by the jam at the Indigo club (around the back of the O2 Arena), where he explored the Stevie Wonder and Sly Stone songbooks. Most impressive was the sheer energy and exuberance of it all, the fact that he has been playing 2-hour shows followed by long ‘after-parties’ 6 nights a week for over a year. Also impressive was the unusual lyric about ‘how to please your woman’: “if the toilet seat is up / put it down!” (huge cheers from the ladies). To top it all off, we returned to the West End from Greenwich by boat at 3am for £4!

The summer also saw the death of my father. I don’t go into personal stuff here, but I’ll make an exception for Dad. He was 92 and sharp as a tack up to the end and working on a book about the state of the world’s economy. My brother and I were able to spend 2 days talking to him before he faded. His musical taste began with Bach and found anything after Brahms a bit problematic. He approved of what I did without really understanding it or listening to any of the recordings. But one of the many platitudes he used to annoy me with as a teenager stuck. People, he said, would insist that aesthetics and pragmatics are incompatible, but they were wrong. There was always a way to make aesthetics work and I mustn’t listen to those who say they can’t. These words stayed with me as I was struggling to promote Nick Drake, Cubanismo, Richard & Linda Thompson and all the others. His book is about preserving local economies in the face of globalization and how vigorously communities had to fight to resist being crushed by big capital. So it wasn’t that difficult to apply his lessons to music! (If you live near Princeton, NJ and want to hear more about him and maybe listen to some Bach, there will be a memorial on Sept 30 at 2pm at the Princeton Public Library.)

I am now nearing the end of a short trip to North America. The primary purpose was to attend Martha Wainwright’s wedding at the McGarrigle homestead in St Sauveur, Quebec. The bride was gorgeous, Brad (the groom)’s father astounded all the folkies with his impeccable crooning, Teddy Thompson and Jenni Muldaur delivered a joyous Viva Las Vegas, Rufus sang the Gounod/Bach version of Ave Maria, Linda Thompson harmonized with her offspring on Dimming of the Day, Kate McGarrigle hovered over everything like the angel she is, the weather was beautiful and a good time was had by all.

My subsequent stop in Toronto revealed that Mary Margaret O’Hara will be re-releasing Miss America. I am very pleased about this, partly because it’s a wonderful record and partly because Mary has promised to correct the cover copy that failed to credit me with co-producing most of the tracks. I had originally tried to sign Mary Margaret to Hannibal, but my proposal was trumped by one from Virgin. When Mary suggested I ought to produce it, Virgin snorted and said they wanted a proper ‘commercial’ production, not a ‘Joe Boyd’ record. They brought her and her great Canadian band to Rockville Studios in Wales and put them together with Andy Partridge of XTC, a man evidently unfamiliar with the concept of everyone playing together live in the studio. The Canadians rebelled, so they sent for me. We cut an lp’s worth of tracks but my schedule and Mary’s plans for finishing the record at a leisurely Ontario pace didn’t gel, so it came out much later with Michael Brook credited as producer. Most of the tracks are the ones we recorded in Wales.

After Canada, I proceeded to Northampton, MA to for the weekly ‘singing’ of Sacred Harp music organized by Tim Eriksen. Tim and I tried to make a Sacred Harp cd years ago for Hannibal but it didn’t work out quite as we planned and the project fell victim to the general deterioration of my relationship with Hannibal’s parent company. He then created some of that extraordinary music for the sound-track of “Cold Mountain” and from his base in Massachusetts, the Sacred Harp phenomenon has spread far and wide – there are now regular ‘singings’ all over the US and in Britain. The Sacred Harp hymnbook contains four-part arrangements written in the early 19th century. The four sections sit on four sides of a church, with the leader in the middle. The harmonies and counter-point are unlike anything else and thrilling to hear. I’m trying to make sure that a great recording of that music will eventually be heard. Le Mystere de Voix Americaine!

(If you’re interested in learning more, visit www.wmshc.org or www.fasola.org)

Happy Autumn everyone

Joe

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Dear Mailing List,

The big events since my last letter have been the tour of America and the Syd Barrett tribute concert in London. Let’s start with the latter. (If you have no interest in Pink Floyd, skip the next thirteen paragraphs.)

Following Syd’s death last summer, Bryn Ormrod from the Barbican Theatre asked me if I would take charge of a concert in Syd’s honour. Concerned that such a task would be beyond my abilities, contacts and awareness of contemporary music, I demurred, but came up with a suggestion.

Nick Laird-Clowes is an old friend of mine; he was lead singer of a group I produced for Hannibal called The Act, but better known for his work with Dream Academy (“Life In A Northern Town”). (Ballooning production costs and miniscule sales for The Act almost brought an early demise to Hannibal Records, but that’s another story…. ) Since the end of Dream Academy he has written a number of Pink Floyd songs with David Gilmour and released his own music under the nom de guerre of “Trash Monk”. More to the point, he is a man of boundless energy and great originality who has always paid attention to what’s going on in the contemporary musical world (unlike myself). So I introduced him to Bryn and suggested that he, rather than I, should produce the Syd evening. I agreed to stay involved as an advisory figure.

In the months leading up to the May 10 date, Nick found lots of film footage and secured the cooperation of the Floyd – but only in terms of access to archive material etc. Many artists stated their undying love for Syd and his music, but getting them to commit to appear on the night proved far more difficult. Chrissie Hynde was the glorious exception, choosing her songs straight away and never wavering in her support, giving Nick famous phone numbers and email addresses and generally picking up our flagging spirits. (Now back from America, I was trying to help secure a good roster for the show.)

We benefitted from the fact that tickets were selling well, even with no performers advertised. We could tell interested singers that they needn’t be billed and could take time to make up their minds and choose a song or two. But two weeks before the concert, things were looking grim: we had only a handful of 100% committed singers and some very important songs weren’t covered. Things began to turn our way when Nick and I attended the launch of Storm Thorgeson’s Hipgnosis book at Abbey Road studios. The 3 Floyds were there and Rick Wright seemed up for the possibility of reprising his performance of Arnold Layne on Gilmour’s tour last summer. But he wouldn’t say for sure.

I had also talked with Roger Waters when I was in New York for my ‘gig’ at Joe’s Pub a few weeks earlier. We had noted the fact that May 10 was an open day on his tour of Europe, nicely positioned between Birmingham and London. Again, he was friendly and interested but not certain of coming along. Nick and I decided that the only way to proceed was to put together the best possible show on the assumption that none of Syd’s former band-mates would participate. (And we didn’t blame them for their reticence; if they had announced an appearance weeks in advance, it would have turned into a Pink Floyd rather than a Syd gig and I think they also quite naturally wanted to see what we would come up with in the way of a show before deciding if it was an event they wanted to be a part of.)

With a week ago to go, we had a pretty decent line-up of Chrissie, Damon Albarn, Nick himself, Kevin Ayers, Mike Heron, Vashti Bunyan, The Bees, Robyn Hitchcock and Captain Sensible plus a choir from Liverpool (which Damon Albarn is using in his opera) and a great backing group led by Adam Peters (Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain and work with PJ Harvey etc) on keyboards with Ted Barnes (Beth Orton) on guitar, Andy Bell (Ride, Oasis) on bass and Simon Finley (Echo and The Bunnymen) on drums. Nick had also brought in the Floyd’s original lighting man Peter Wynne Wilson as well as the Boyle Family, whose late patriarch Mark created much of the lighting at the UFO Club.

Three key songs remained unclaimed: Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Interstellar Overdrive. I asked Richard Thompson if he wanted to fly over from LA to improvise a tribute to Syd’s great guitar playing on the latter number, but he wasn’t free, much as he’d have loved to do it. Robyn Hitchcock told me that Jimmy Page was also a fan of Syd’s, but he wasn’t free either. That was the only real disappointment of the evening for me – we didn’t have a guitar soloist to do justice to Syd’s originality on the instrument.  (Although what Nick and the House Band cooked up on Chapter 24 came close to making up for it.)

My hope for See Emily Play was tied to Martha Wainwright’s presence in town to sing Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. The chance to see their daughter and cousin on that famous stage had drawn Kate McGarrigle and Lilly Lanken here at just the right time. I sent them all copies of Emily as well as Golden Hair and crossed my fingers. There was still no one doing Arnold Layne: David Bowie had done it once, but he wasn’t up for it, and our other choice Jarvis Cocker was on tour in America and up to his neck in organizing Meltdown.

The House Band started work at Nick’s studio on the weekend before and one by one the singers began to arrive. Tuesday and Wednesday there were rehearsals at a bigger studio and things began to take shape. We had an encouraging call from Roger Waters’ manager and some positive signals from Rick Wright, but we still had big gaps. Nick had managed to get keyboardist John Carin along, which was a big plus. He has been a key sideman with Pink Floyd, Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters. If any of them decided to join us, they would find a familiar and reliable ally on stage. And Nick was keeping Gilmour apprised of all developments.

The night before, we had a firm commitment: Roger would come and sing one song, but he had to meet his girlfriend at the airport later that night so would need to be gone by 9pm. Now we had a closer for the first half, and the entire company plus the choir doing Bike to finish the show, but still no Arnold Layne.

Technical hang-ups meant we only received the footage we wanted to use by messenger at around 3pm Thursday afternoon. As we were frantically figuring out which bit went where, we got the news: Rick would do Arnold Layne and Nick Mason (whom we had thought was in Germany) would join Dave Gilmour to make it a Pink Floyd performance. Everyone suddenly got more excited. Martha, Kate and Lilly arrived with arrangements for both songs and the evening was set.

The audience seemed to love the variety of textures and styles – I thought maybe we could have used a few heavier sounds, but there were few complaints. We played a black &white tv clip of Syd being attacked by Hans Keller – “vhy must ze music be zo LOUD?” – which drew a lot of laughter and was also moving in its revelation of the charming and sharp pre-breakdown Syd. My personal highlight was going on stage to make a short speech right after Chrissie Hynde’s wonderful take on Dark Globe and thanking everyone who had helped out. I was then able to tell the unsuspecting audience that Arnold Layne would be performed by “Nick, Rick and David – Pink Floyd!” The roar that greeted this was incredible – and quite a thrill to be in the path of it, even as the messenger rather than the message. You can see what a buzz being a rock star must be!

Many of the audience expressed surprise at how great the show was considering how shambolic the whole thing appeared. I think people have become so accustomed to ‘perfect’ and well-rehearsed shows that it comes as a shock to see performers making things up as they go along. This was particularly gratifying for me, as I have long resisted rehearsals or over-preparedness in recording sessions. Some of my greatest tracks are first or second takes and I once shocked a producer’s panel at SXSW by announcing that I had never done ‘pre-production’ in my life. I think some of the best performances are to be heard when artists are groping for a way to play something. When it gets set in stone, it often becomes less exciting. I was also pleased the Barbican agreed to my stipulation about recordings on the PA: no music before, after or during intermission. When the audience left the hall, their heads were full of what they had heard live on stage, not some tracks the sound man played in order to signal to everyone it was ok to stop clapping.

(I have attached a set list below, along with the concert programme, the Guardian review and a link to some photos of the evening.)

My promotional tour of the US was not as intense as the Syd concert, but quite enjoyable and successful nonetheless. Americans seemed to like the book as much as do the British.

It got off to a flying start at the SXSW event in Austin, TX when Robyn Hitchcock invited me to join him onstage the first afternoon. I read a bit, he sang a song from the text: Newport ‘65/Don’t Think Twice; UFO Club/Arnold Layne; Nick Drake/River Man; Incredible String Band at Woodstock/Chinese White.  On Friday, I was interviewed onstage by my old friend Ed Ward. (A clip of same is viewable at http://2007.sxsw.com/video/movie_window.2007.php?dir=2007_trailers&id=1145)

There were a number of other highlights, including getting another look at the wonderful documentary on Nick Drake, A Skin Too Few, and enjoying musical whiplash going straight from a concert by Vashti Bunyan to a bar where Amy Winehouse was performing.

My memories of SXSWs past often include another kind of cultural whiplash as the festival coincides with the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. I remember passing up a ‘must-see’ showcase in 1996 in favour of watching Princeton upset UCLA in a nearby bar – very gratifying for an Ivy Leaguer in the LA-centric music biz. This year I chose wisely, my one full tv game being Virginia Commonwealth’s 79-77 upset of Duke. As you can tell, I generally support underdogs. I named my label after one, didn’t I? Hannibal and his Carthaginians terrified the ‘big club’ Roman Empire for 26 years!  In London, I have supported Queens Park Rangers for 40 years….

My readings began in the Bay Area – Time Tested Books in Sacremento, Black Oak in Berkeley and Booksmith in San Francisco – which gave me a chance to visit my old friend Eric Jacobson. Eric and I have had opposite destinies as record producers. I have made many records, few of which have sold in any significant quantity. Eric makes few records but they all sell millions: Daydream, Spirit In The Sky and Wicked Game. Eric spends his time and money wisely. From his home near Mt Tamalpais in Marin County he roams the world pursuing various collecting obsessions: rare kilims from Central Asia, pre-Columbian cloths from the Andes and now Japanese kimono art from the early 20th century. He has self-published a brilliant full-colour coffee-table book called Animal Myth and Magic: images from pre-Columbian textiles. (no website, but available from Ololo Press, Box 457, Larkspur CA 94977) . It’s an amazing book; highly recommended.

Powell’s of Portland and Eliot Bay in Seattle followed. I visited the Experience Music Project in Seattle to record an ‘Oral History’ interview. The Frank Gehry-designed museum is spectacular, but kind of spooky the way it seems to have so few visitors for such a huge outlay of Paul Allen’s fortune. Then it was on to Minneapolis where my fellow ex-Ryko director Rob Simonds is running the Cedar Cultural Centre. I did a ‘discussion’ there with Zen guitarist and raconteur Steve Tibbetts and visited Consortium Books, the distributors handling White Bicycles in the US.

Then came New York and Joe’s Pub. This was a bit scary since unlike the bookstores, people had to actually buy tickets for this one. Fortunately, between the ones given away to press and friends and the actual ticket-buying public, the place was full. It was an expansion on what Robyn and I had done in Austin, with Geoff Muldaur, Jenni Muldaur and Hitchcock all playing songs connected to the bits of the book that I read or talked about. No questions from the audience this time, but it went well and it was fun being on the legendary stage that Bill Bragin has turned into the key showcase in New York.

Geoff and Robyn were both superb, as expected, so I will inject a word here about Jenni. Her performance of Sandy Denny’s The Sea was a clear highpoint of the evening. It is not the kind of song she usually sings, but she is so versatile that once she got the hang of it, she sang it beautifully. ‘Versatility’ has always been Jenni’s problem, in a way. She can mimic any style or singer, but she hasn’t got her own clear identity as a singer. Twenty years ago she was given the poisoned chalice of a major label deal with Warner Brothers. Producer Russ Titelman sacked her musicians – the ones with whom she had worked out all the arrangements – and hired top level session guys. The result was a disappointing debut that the label abandoned before it was even released. Despite the de-railed career, she has made a success of writing and singing jingles and has sung both harmony and solo in remarkably diverse contexts. Let the real Jenni Muldaur step forward!

In New York I finally met Jim Floyd, the man who took the cover photo for White Bicycles. He said he had always liked it but figured it wasn’t worth anything because of the unknown guy in the hat in the middle spoiling the great shot of Eric Von Schmidt, Geoff & Maria Muldaur and Tom Rush.

I returned to old haunts in Cambridge, doing an interview on Harvard’s WHRB and depressing Harvard students with tales of how wide-open the music scene was there in the early ‘60s, in contrast to the present situation. Then I did a reading at Passim, the successor to Club 47, with a great cameo appearance by Dana Kletter singing a couple of Sandy Denny songs. People sometimes ask me if there are any other records from my past that I feel will be ‘discovered’ as Nick Drake’s and Vashti Bunyan’s discs have been. Right at the top of list would be Dear Enemy by Dana and her twin sister Karen, as well as Bareback by Hank Dogs.

The tour finished up in Los Angeles where I did readings at the Skirball Cultural Center and Book Soup. The first one was great – I got more laughs than anywhere. (The audience chortled at the Lonnie Johnson ‘fuzzy monster’ story for what seemed like an age.) There were reunions with faces from my past: Jac Holzman came to the Skirball reading and I had dinner a few nights later with Mo Ostin.

All in all, it was a great trip. I was inspired by all the wonderful bookshops and cultural centres and the people running them. Watching from abroad, it is easy to forget how full America is of idealistic and energetic people who want no part of the Bush Administration’s jihad. But let’s not get started on politics!

Over and out.

Joe Boyd

Dear Mailing List,

Today finds me in the belly of the rock ‘n’ roll beast – Austin, Texas and the SXSW conference/festival. The relentless thud of snare drum and amplified rhythm guitar is never silent, even through the insulated, permanently sealed glass windows of a chain hotel room.

Things are looking quite good, however, despite the background noise. The beginning of my American tour to launch ‘White Bicycles’ in the Land of the Free Download got off to an auspicious start. Today’s New York Times has a nice article about the book (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/arts/music/15boyd.html?ref=arts) and yesterday I joined Robyn Hitchcock on stage for a nostalgic look at ‘60s music. I read, he sang the songs I mentioned and we talked about the old days. Despite my being terminally linear in conversation and Robyn being his usual surreal self, it seemed to work. We and the audience had fun, in any case. I think a video is available on the SXSW website and eventually, I trust, on mine. Later in the festival I will do an extended interview with Ed Ward and take part in a panel on Nick Drake.

Speaking of the website, there is now a full listing of the dates on the US tour in case any of you are near enough and want to attend a reading. There are also some new articles and radio programmes plus an “International” section with publication information, press and radio in Spanish, French, German, Dutch/Flemish and Italian. Last week I had a very enjoyable visit to Spain for the publication of “Blancas Bicicletas”. (Yes, I know it should be “Bicicletas Blancas” but Julian Vinuales from Global Rhythm Press assures me the unorthodox word order sounded more poetic….) Julian and Claudia from GRP entertained me royally, the Spanish press asked interesting questions and I got to watch Liverpool eliminate Barcelona in a café full of rabid ‘socios’ (Barca fans).

As you can tell, I have been travelling and enjoying shooting my mouth off in congenial circumstances. I hope there continue to be items of interest on the web page (many thanks to Gavin Bush and Claudia Mower for keeping it moving forward – all compliments I get about it should go to them). My return to London in mid-April will find me plunging full-tilt into writing the World Music book. (Although I already have accepted an invitation to do a reading at Shakespeare & Co in Paris on May 7.)

In closing, I must mention the highpoint of the past month – a visit to the Memphis studio of Willie Mitchell, producer/arranger of the great Al Green and Ann Peebles classics. It was like stepping into a time-warp – the studio is unchanged since 1969. No digital equipment allowed! The stairs to the ‘modern’ quadraphonic control room they built in the 1970s are covered in dust and cobwebs while the original instruments, sound baffles and tape machines are exactly as they were when they saw the recording of those fabulous Hi Records hits. Willie himself is a dapper, urbane witty gentleman, who casually doodled horncharts for the new Al Green cd for Blue Note on a Casio 2 octave keyboard during my visit. Many thanks to local journalist Andria Lisle for taking me there.

All the best

Joe

Welcome to the first Joe Boyd newsletter. If you would prefer that this be your last, please click on the appropriate link at the bottom of the page.

Some of you have subscribed via the website – www.joeboyd.co.uk – and some are receiving it because I put your name on a list. For the latter group, I should point out that while the website is largely a shameless publicity tool, it has the redeeming feature that you can use it to listen to some of my favourite music via the streaming of radio programmes I have done recently – listen while you work! You can also read articles I have written, ponder the glowing reviews of my book and find out about upcoming radio and live appearances as I continue to put off writing my next book by promoting White Bicycles.

The US WB campaign starts March 16 at 1:45pm in Austin, TX at the SXSW festival, followed by events at Joe’s Pub in New York, Passim’s in Cambridge MA and other hubs of culture from coast to coast. My UK publisher, Serpents Tail, are taking on the challenge with the help of Consortium, their US distributor and Shore Fire, the best (in my view) music publicists in America. As no American publisher matched their commitment it should be an exciting David v Goliath story with, insh’allah, as happy an ending as we have had in the UK (nearing the 20,000 mark in sales).

There is already a Spanish translation, whose publication via Global Rhythm Press is imminent with a German version courtesy of Kunstmann Verlag and a French one from Allia to follow later this year.
My recent BBC Radio 4 tribute to the great A&R man John Hammond can now be heard on the website. Hammond signed Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie in the ’30s, then came back 30 years later to kick off the careers of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Aretha  Franklin. Much to my astonishment, the BBC budget for the programme stretched to flying in Dunstan Prial, author of The Producer (an excellent biography of Hammond) to join me and host Matthew Parris in extolling the great man’s life and works.
 
I can also recommend a new Dedalus book, The Decadent Handbook (edited by Rowan Pelling), which includes an extract from White Bicycles dealing with what Rowan considered the suitably louche goings-on at the UFO Club in 1967.

It has been a very gratifying year. After sending so many musicians out on tour, I have enjoyed being both tour manager and artist. The summer festivals took me to parts of England I hadn’t visited in many years and I had a chance to meet some of the fans who have been buying records I’ve produced going back to the 1960s.

When there is more to report, I will send another newsletter.

All the best

Joe