Last month, writer and record producer Ian Brennan stopped by City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in San Francisco to promote his latest book, Missing Music, and latest album, Our Ancestors Swam to Shore. The disc, he advised, would not fit the fashion of what’s marketed as world music these days — slickly produced and designed to tour to concert halls and upscale clubs.
The album’s title refers to escaped slaves from Angola, the ancestors of the people Brennan recorded on São Tomé, an island 200 miles off the west coast of Africa. Their language and their music are unique, soulful, and enchanting.
This recording expedition by Brennan forms one of many short chapters (called Road Maps) in Missing Music, generously illustrated by his wife, photographer and filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli. Several of Brennan’s previous books have also tracked his career recording and producing 40 albums over five continents.
Aside from São Tomé, Missing Music provides brief but vital and rare insights into the people and music of Ghana, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Suriname, Bhutan, Botswana, Comoros, Tuva, Djibouti, Kashmir, Namibia, and Rwanda, the last the paternal homeland of Delli and the site of Brennan’s first global recording more than a decade ago. There are also domestic accounts of Parchman prison in Mississippi and the historic Africatown district outside Mobile, Alabama.
Missing Music “doesn’t rehash a lot of stuff you already know,” noted singer-songwriter Peter Case during the City Lights event. Case’s 2007 album Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John was produced by Brennan and nominated for a Grammy Award (as were several of Brennan’s other projects). The 2011 album Tassili, by the Saharan group Tinariwen — produced and recorded by Brennan — won the Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album in 2012.
Born in Oakland in 1966, Brennan made youthful attempts to establish himself as a guitar-playing songwriter in the Bay Area before going on to produce albums and live concerts for an eclectic mix of artists. As a second career, he conducts workshops in anger management and conflict resolution, the motivation for which he traces to his family history, including the experiences of an older sister with Down syndrome, recounted in two sections of his latest book.
“I’m most excited by nonmusicians,” Brennan told the audience in City Lights’ upstairs Poetry Room. “It’s certainly difficult to find music of quality, but in private spaces, there’s still hope.” Approvingly, he referred to The Good Ones, an acoustic trio from Rwanda, as “the Nick Drake of world music.”
In the trio’s chapter in the book — and in generally recounting his dealings with the musicians whom he has recorded and who have gone on to bookings far from their home countries — Brennan writes that “no matter the group’s international acclaim and opportunities … the men and their families still struggle to make ends meet.” He details the challenges of transportation and communication. “They excel not because of these factors, but in spite of them.”
Themes of deprivation and isolation (the book’s subtitle is Voices From Where the Dirt Roads End) recur and beckon for greater attention from the rest of the world. Brennan, without pretense of presenting a musicological tome, freely mixes polemic in with his storytelling. “More than blatantly bad art, the ultimate cultural crime is mediocrity,” he declares in a chapter about recording the voices of centenarians in Azerbaijan, whom he treasures for their “lives lived in analog, standing as an antidote to artificial intelligence art and Auto-Tuned vocals.” An afterword and epilogue prompt the reader to compare the dizzying, dazzling experience of the author in his Jonathan Swift-like sweep across the planet with his homecoming to the culture of the Bay Area.
Missing Music provides insight into Brennan’s passion, raw and inciting, another of his contributions to a more unified world consciousness.
