Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End
details Grammy-winning music producer and author Ian Brennan’s ongoing
quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations and
populations around the world.
In a compact and quick-read format, Missing Music
collects the latest narratives from Brennan’s field-recording treks.
This edition features a greater emphasis on storytelling and an even
greater abundance of photos from his wife, Italian-Rwandan
photographer/filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli.
Together, they meet
the elderly shamans of the world’s most musical language, Taa, a tongue
that sadly is dying, with fewer than 2,500 speakers left. The duo
traveled the most remote roads of Botswana to find the formally nomadic
people now relegated to small desert towns.
In Azerbaijan, Brennan
and Delli ascended to the mountainous Iranian border to record
centenarians in scattered villages of the Talysh minority, where the
world’s oldest man reportedly reached the age of 168. The result is the
only record ever released to feature the voices of singers over
one-hundred years of age.
Among other tales, Brennan also updates
the saga of the Sheltered Workshop Singers following COVID, including
the tragic deterioration of his sister, Jane.
Arising from the
more than forty records that Brennan has produced over the past decade
from underrepresented nations such as Comoros, Djibouti, Romania, South
Sudan, Suriname, and Cambodia, Missing Music serves as the
newest suite in the multiverse symphony of the world’s most ignored
corners–the places where countries expire and the “forgotten” live.
