Producer Joe Boyd presents And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain @ The Rivoli, April 13

Music producer & author Joe Boyd is launching the paperback edition of And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain at The Rivoli. 

Here's the scoop... 

Legendary music producer, writer and record label boss Joe Boyd is something of a Leonard Zelig of 20th century popular music. He was the production manager for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric, managed European tours of Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Reverend Gary Davis and Coleman Hawkins,  ran the UK office of Elektra Records and started London's pioneering psychedelic club UFO, produced the first Pink Floyd single and discovered Nick Drake while also working with Cream, Soft Machine, The Move, Arthur Brown and John Martyn. He also signed the nascent Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band and put together the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and Deliverance which turned the instrumental "Dueling Banjos" into a surprise chart-topping hit 1973 and earned a Grammy for Eric Weissburg & Steve Mandell. All of that – in addition to working with Toots and the Maytals, Kate & Anna McGarrigle and R.E.M. while running Hannibal Records – he still found time to travel to travel across the planet while digging deep into the music and cultures that created it. 

Watching how the global audience for the music of Africa, India and Latin America grew and expanded, Boyd was taking notes when what came known as "world music" in the 80s became ubiquitous popular music with recordings like Paul Simon's multi-million selling Graceland album from 1986. And Boyd must've seen it coming. In fact, back in 1969 – before Fela Kuti and Tony Allen hit on Afrobeat – he'd recorded his own "township bop" experiments to update kwela music for an audience outside of South Africa with Dudu Pukwana, Chris MacGregor,  Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo, Richard Thompson and members of Osibisa but he was unfortunately a little bit too ahead of the curve for it to be profitable (check out Dudu Pukwana & The Spears). Hey, timing is everything which Boyd knows as well as anyone having had to wait for a 1999 Volkswagen commercial for the rest of the world to recognize the magic in Nick Drake's music he'd spotted more than 30 years prior.  

Boyd's latest work, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain (out in paperback April 1 via Ze Books) – which he half-jokingly calls "a history book disguised as a music book" – is the story of how this globalization of music happened told by someone with the uncanny ability to be in the right spot at the exactly the right time, the breadth of knowledge and historical perspective to connect the dots along with the knack for spinning a yarn to make for an engrossing read and a captivating talk. 

He'll present his findings in Toronto at The Rivoli on Sunday, April 13 from 2pm to 3:30pm (doors at 1 pm). General admission tickets are $18.50 (plus $1.50 service charge) available right here. Check out a few of Joe Boyd's recent interviews (including a discussion of global music for the Rock's Back Pages Podcast right here) followed by a list of upcoming dates on his reading tour below.