CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Ian Brennan in conversation with Peter Case

City Lights and PM Press celebrate the publication of
Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End
By Ian Brennan
Introduction by Marilena Umuhoza Delli
Foreword by Dame Evelyn
Published by PM Press
Purchase books by Ian Brennan at this link:
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Ian Brennan in conversation with Peter Case
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.
Ian Brennan is Grammy-winning producer who has produced three Grammy-nominated albums and published seven books while also teaching violence prevention around the world since 1993 for organizations such as the Smithsonian and the National Accademia of Science (Rome). Brennan released his first album in 1987 and in the past decade has produced over forty records by international artists from five continents, which have resulted in the first widely released original music albums from nations such as Rwanda, Malawi, Kosovo, South Sudan, Romania, Comoros, and Vietnam. He has worked with artists as diverse as Fugazi, country legend Merle Haggard, Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. His work has appeared in the New York Times, PBS television, and in an Emmy-winning segment of 60 Minutes.
Peter Case is a singer-songwriter and guitarist. His career is wide-ranging, from rock n’ roll and blues, to folk rock and solo acoustic performance. In 1976, he teamed up with Jack Lee and Paul Collins to form the early punk-era band The Nerves in San Francisco. The group’s 1976 EP track, “Hanging on the Telephone”, was later recorded by Blondie. After The Nerves broke up in 1978, Case formed the rock n’ roll band The Plimsouls in 1979. He is also renown for his own solo recordings which include records like “The Man With the Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar”, “Six-Pack of Love”, “Torn Again”, and more recently “The Midnight Broadcast” featuring Cindy Wasserman, Bert Deivert, Lee Fortier, Franklin, and Ross Johnson.
Originally broadcast on Monday, September 30, 2024
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation