Musical Legacies

A.D. Carson’s new album, “iv: talking with ghosts,” was written under the heaviness of covid lockdown, the deaths of close friends and family, and the worldwide protests addressing the deaths of Black people at the hands of police. Carson shares the deeply personal place this album comes from and his work to include his family and friends in the historical record.

Africans and their descendants once made up a big part of the colonial Mexican population. But the musical canon from this period is so white. Sarah Finley is uncovering a thriving Afro-Mexican sound culture whose influence can still be heard in present-day Mexican music.

 In recent years, much has been done to reroot genres like blues, jazz, reggaeton, and calypso in African musical traditions. We know that enslaved African Americans played a lot of music and that music was important to their lives. And yet, we know very little about what the music of enslaved people actually sounded like during their own times. Mary Caton Lingold’s forthcoming book aims to account for that music and trumpet the legacy of performers whose names have largely been forgotten, but whose sounds still echo.