Very few books in ethnomusicology and in popular music studies offer a retrospective of a scholar's career and contributions. But reading in a single volume the publications written by an author over the years is truly illuminating. It reveals how an author writes the way she writes and how she arrives at addressing particular themes rather than others, for whom, and why. It provides a sort of mapping of the academic preoccupations and the social movements that were animating particular times and spaces and inspiring her writings. It also shows how one's personal disposition, own way of being, sensitivity, engagement, training and experiences shape the stories one tells as much as how the vagaries of history and the musical practice under study also greatly influence one's writing. I thank the three editors, Simon Frith, Stan Rijven and Ian Christie, for making this book publication possible following Jan Fairley's passing. Trained in Edinburgh University where she received her PhD in ethnomusicology with an emphasis on Latin American musics, Jan was, from the outset, also part of a progressive wave of scholars, journalists and critics, many of whom were all three, who launched the first wave of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in the early 1980s. She, in fact, actively contributed to the Association's journal by having three of the book's chapters appear originally in Popular Music, two of the earliest in 1988 and 1989, and the essay on regeton in 2006. Her life was cut short by cancer, but her legacy as an ethnomusicologist, journalist and activist will now be accessible through this selected collection of her writings originally published in academic books, journals and the popular press between 1984 and 2012.

Divided into four parts, the book encapsulates Jan's main preoccupations during her career. Part I, ‘Nueva Canción: Writings on Chile’, assembles articles written after a defining moment while she was living in Chile: the 1973 military coup by Pinochet. As this section makes clear, her publications from the very beginning of her career become centred around cultural politics: how artists position themselves in relation to the nation-state, musical traditions, class and gender; and how she positions herself and reflects on her work as a scholar, journalist, broadcaster and activist; as a foreigner, woman and white.

The first chapter on ‘La Nueva Canción Latinoamericana’ (1984) introduces the sociopolitical conditions in which this musical tradition emerges and how it must be seen as ‘a breakaway form, rather than as a natural evolution of the urban folk music tradition’ (p. 13: all page references to the edition under review). In this short article (six and a half pages), Jan demonstrates her remarkable ability to produce in condensed form an amazing amount of detail, not only about the left-wing parties and the communist party of the time, but also the musical traditions to which nueva canción is related. In contrast to most ethnomusicological publications up to the early 1980s which usually referred to communities rather than individuals, Jan's active work as a journalist and her involvement with IASPM led her to take a different approach to writing ethnography. She names the artists, the groups and some of the songs that contributed to establish nueva canción during that troubled period in Chile. Typical of ethnographic writings of the time, however, her ‘informants’ do not speak (yet!).

As a scholar of popular music, we see how Jan took a bolder approach to aesthetic issues than most ethnomusicologists typically did even in the late 1980s. In Chapter 2, ‘Alive and performing in Latin America’ (1988), she reviews five live albums by some leading artists of nueva canción and nueva trova: Silvio Rodriguez – Pablo Milanés en vivo en Argentina with Victor Heredia, César Isella, Cuarteto Zupay, Antonio Tarragó and León Gieco; Corazón Americano with Mercedes Sosa, León Gieco and Milton Nascimento; La voz de América Latina with Mercedes Sosa; Todavia cantamos with Mercedes Sosa; and Tercer Festival de la Nueva Canción Latinoamericana. On the one hand, based on her ethnographic research in Latin America, she informs readers of the importance of live concerts in Argentina and Chile during certain periods as ‘the only significant available space for the coming of a certain political community’ (p. 22). She further notes how her ethnographic work influences how she reviews albums: ‘My research has shown that many concerts are constructed as narratives, and I have begun approaching records to see if they work in the same way’ (p. 23). On the other hand, Jan does not shy away from admonishing certain versions of nueva canción that, in her view, do not conform to the tradition. Hearing the album of the Tercer Festival de la Nueva Canción Latinoamericana as ‘overloaded with (dare I write it!) music created and arranged by the head – vicarious involvement – and not by the heart or guts’, she writes unapologetically, ‘I must admit to an antipathy for Adrián Goizueta's Grupo Experimental de Costa Rica, to my knowledge the only group including itself in the nueva canción movement to use music stands and scores on stage, thus looking at what they are supposed to play rather than at the people to whom they are playing’ (p. 25). Her political views here trump the musical quality or integrity of that version, since for her such a performance stands as ‘a contradictory practice for musicians who claim to be part of a movement whose origins lie in roots traditions and whose priority is direct communication’ (p. 25).

The next two chapters focus on two of the most important Chilean nueva canción groups, ¡Karaxú! and Inti-Illimani, whose members spent many years in exile following the 1973 Chilean coup d’état. Whereas ¡Karaxú! was founded in France in 1974, Inti-Illimani was formed in Chile and performed in the country between 1967 and 1973. On tour during the coup, Inti-Illimani remained in exile in Italy between 1973 and 1988 before returning that year to Chile. In ‘Analysing performance: narrative and ideology in concerts by ¡Karaxú!’ (1989), Jan writes, [This analysis] ‘differs from other studies of the music of Chilean exiles and, indeed, other approaches to modern urban musical concerts in that it focuses on the concert performance as a whole entity. I analyse the music in performance, providing an analytical framework abstracted from participant observation work with the musicians, and focusing on the negotiation of meaning through the organization of repertoire into a performance structure’ (p. 27). Here Jan describes how this Chilean group framed their performance as a political act, and how the musicians viewed their audiences as ‘a substitute for the MIR [Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria]'s grassroots political constituency in Chile’ (p. 29). She describes the emphasis the performers placed on communicating with the people, the strategies they used to create a sense of community, and the speeches they voiced to explain each song and ‘its raison d’être for the group’ (p. 35). In this chapter, Jan demonstrates her musical chops by providing detailed explanations of the three broad musical categories from which the group draws in their compositions: música andina (Andean music) consisting of instrumental pieces; música folklorica, which consists of Chilean and Latin American folk songs and dances; and nueva canción/música nueva (p. 36). Her descriptions, however, are not merely technical. They are interspersed by poignant quotes from the musicians who, while introducing the different musical styles, use the opportunity to recall history, to address ideology, to conjure up a rally, to transmit values and to create a sense of community. I found fruitful Jan's construction of performance as narrative with its distinct play on time, its mythical elements, its construction of place, and desires. However, it is especially her focus on voice that I find most stimulating, not only as marker of identity on a verbal and textual level, but also as emotional expression and a way of producing many niveles de presencia through the use of different textures and registers. Could it be that Jan's focus on voice and her insertion of numerous quotes in 1989 was triggered by the so-called ‘crisis in anthropology’ and the publication of Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnographic Writing (1986) that was deeply influential at the time of this writing?

In contrast to her analysis of ¡Karaxú!'s performance in the preceding chapter, Jan's next essay, ‘Inti-Illimani: living through making music’ (2002), provides a biography of the group. It recounts the group's musical journey following three broadly defined periods, ‘singing in very different political atmospheres to very different audiences: Chile 1967–73; Italy/Europe/the world 1973–88; Chile 1988–2002’ (p. 47). Here we learn how independently of the group's own orientation, ‘they have come to stand for a significant cohort of Chileans who were involved in the dramatic politics of the 1960s and 1970s’ (p. 45). The musical formation of this group of University students in the 1960s, she writes, started casually, singing and playing Latin American popular music, and simply sharing the dynamism and passion inspired by ‘the momentum in Latin America [that] had much to do with the successful 1959 Cuban revolution’ (p. 47). After the coup the musicians continued to play the repertoires they liked independently of any political parties but, as Jan explains, the formal and informal concerts the group performed in exile had titles like ‘Music for Freedom’, thus greatly contributing to making their repertoire appear political. In addition to the informative description of Inti-Illimani's music over the 30-plus years of their career, the strength of this chapter lies in Jan's tracing of the importance that regional and international connections have for Latin American musicians, and her focus on documenting the challenges musicians face not only in exile, but also when they return home.

Part II concerns Jan's writings on world music. In chapter 5, entitled ‘The “local” and “global” in popular music’ (2001), Jan's experience as broadcaster and party DJ speaks volumes by showing her keen understanding of the power of media and of the importance of networks. Against both overly pessimistic and optimistic views about world music, she calls for thorough research that can account for ‘not just which music is released on which labels, but the entire set of power relations through which acts get signed, tracks recorded, releases playlisted, concerts booked and so forth’ (p. 64). Following her chronicle of the events that led to the creation of the label ‘world music’, Jan aptly describes how the personal taste of well-placed individuals in the music industries highly influences who gets recorded, and how, in turn, who gets airplay much depends on the connections between DJs and record companies. In the same vein, her account of how the European world music charts were then compiled is revealing (and chilling), particularly, how the preference of just a few individuals (DJs) can make or break an artist and create listening communities. The next few pages are devoted to her analysis of what she calls ‘music-making paradigms’, and what was then considered two of the most contentious cases of world music productions: Ry Cooder's recording of Buena Vista Social Club (1997) and the Paul Simon album, Graceland (1986). With this significant insight, she concludes, ‘What is interesting is the way various musicians have been brought into the ethical and moral arguments that “world music” relationships have raised’ (p. 75).

‘Ports of call: an ethnographic analysis of music programmes on the migration of people, musicians, genres, and instruments, BBC World Service 1994–1995’ (2011) is based on an autobiography of Jan's experience as a broadcaster. It is a fascinating account of a series of programmes she conceived and hosted on migrations, musicians, music, genre and instruments. In this chapter, she demonstrates how ‘radio, and specifically these BBC World Service programmes, not only mediated, but also constructed the “other”’ (p. 78). Her series involved back-and-forth travels, ‘making imaginary journeys and, in doing so, introducing a multiplicity of “others” through music, into not only the intimate, everyday settings of the home, but also into listeners' subjective worlds' (p. 78). Jan's story about this experience acknowledges not only the work that goes into conceiving such programmes, constructing sonically a 40-second trailer to set up the ambience, selecting from one's own collection music one loves, and organising it in a particular sequence to create a certain musical logic. It also speaks about ‘the presenter as intermediary’, as the one ‘who decides on both the hybridity of the programme and its migratory moves’ (p. 81). In this piece, she further reflects on how her ‘white’ British radio voice cannot but have implications in regard to race and ideology and the ways in which her music selections and ‘normalized selected information’ might sound to others (p. 84). Her insertion of feedback comments from her invisible audience at the end of this piece say a great deal about Jan. As the comments well attest, she was fully committed to reaching out to a wide range of audiences and was very successful at that – even though she could not satisfy everyone and master everything as she would have liked.

Chapter 7, ‘The Songlines Guides’, reads like encyclopaedic entries but with a big difference. Whether she addresses Cuban son (1999), charango (2000), flamenco (2006) or cumbia (2008), Jan provides intimate portraits of players together with some of the song titles that propelled the music or instruments in question to world attention. She lets the performers speak, explain and recount themselves aspects of their musical journeys at key moments in her text. Her own descriptions greatly benefit from her long experience in Latin America. They present musically detailed information about each genre and instrument and link them to local as well as regional and international movements and traditions. In these pages, Jan again addresses the work conditions of migrant musicians and briefly refers to women and their roles in cumbia.

The last chapter in this section is aptly called ‘There is a place where music really does change lives … El Sistema’ (2012). This essay shows the ability of Jan's pen to render in a mere three pages a most telling description of this transformative initiative in Venezuela. Jan chose here to recount the power of El Sistema (the teaching of orchestral musical instruments and classic and popular music repertoires to disadvantaged children) by taking us with her on a visit to Venezuela where she meets young musicians and instructors. Taken into a nearby studio during a break in a rehearsal, she is given a short demonstration by one instructor and his two assistants of what these musicians can do. ‘They play a series of fast, rustic, dance-like melodies – the virtuosity is extraordinary, the intensity and rapport between them thrilling and the enthusiasm amazing’ (p. 112). Clearly impressed by such accomplishments, Jan nonetheless stresses how El Sistema ‘is really much more about creating a social structure and responsibility’ (p. 112). This short piece does much to let us know what El Sistema is all about. In one sentence, her critical pen also lets us know why the attempts to replicate El Sistema in other places, such as Raploch, Scotland, are compromised by being based on short-term outcomes rather than on a long-term vision as in Venezuela.

In Part III of the book, Jan's writings on Cuba address the music business, musical life and new musical genres performed in the country during the ‘special period’ of the 1990s and in the new millennium. The first chapter of this section, ‘“Ay Díos, Ampárame” (O God, Protect Me): music during the 1990s, the ‘special period’ (2004), details the profound changes in Cuba following ‘the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the USSR upon which the Cuban economy depended’ (p. 119). As she points out, along with the economic dramatic downfall, other changes – religious, ideological and musical – also take place. Jan's focus on the emergence of timba in the 1990s grants her the opportunity to address the main issues that have been raised during that period: new music economies for musicians now more able to tour and to be recorded by foreign companies; more local taxations on musicians' and music establishments' revenues; intensification of contacts and networks within and outside the Caribbean region; and new musical aesthetics and gender politics on stage. Jan describes the driving dance music of timba ‘in both its traditional and modernized forms’ as ‘exhibiting differences and developments from son’. Its musicians, she remarks, come from the ‘cream of the Cuban music system … with the highest qualifications in classical music, [who] grew up playing popular music and jazz’. Its dance, she adds, is associated with a black Cuban dancing public (p. 123).

It is the inextricable relation between timba and the simultaneous development of the Cuban dance scene that retains Jan's attention. Interestingly, she interprets the focus on women's bodies and the prominence of ‘despelote dancing – women gyrating their pelvis and bottom often with their man standing behind so as to be sexually stimulated in the process’ (p. 131) – in timba as directly related to ‘the larger cultural context of what in Cuba is known as jineterismo (the procurement of services, goods and/or dollars through association/“friendship” with non-Cuban visitors to the island)’ (p. 124). She links what she calls ‘the gender shift in Cuban dancing styles’ (‘away from couple-dancing with the man leading, to the woman's dancing body driving the whole show’, p. 131) to the impact of Cuba's renewed tourism. While such a link cannot be underestimated, could it be that timba dancing is also deeply influenced by other dancing styles, such as dancehall and soca, from the Caribbean? As Cortés, one of her interviewees, indicates, there is nothing new in timba's sexual and exaggerated movements. Not even referring to dances outside Cuba, he reminds Jan of rumba, for example. The main question that Jan still raises is whether such dances constitute a source of empowerment or of alienation for women. This, in my view, is a wrong question. Jan is right that ‘without a shift in gender ideology with economic and social liberation, the position of women in Cuban society’ will not change (p. 132). However, such a shift, as is the case for most shifts, usually begins to happen with small acts – acts that must be evaluated at all times and gauged accordingly.

The next chapter, ‘Dancing back to front’ (2006) continues this discussion on sexuality, gender and transnationalism in relation to regeton in Cuba. Here again, Jan uses her amazing pen and flair as an ethnographer to conjure up scenes she experienced to help us reflect on the important questions the popular culture of regeton raises. The focus is on the dancing body and what it can tell us about the body, gender relations and ethical values. Her first section begins with a provocative title, ‘The body as “convertible currency”’. As a way to clarify this title, her first paragraph speaks about a song referring to foreign tourists: ‘“A tí, te gustan los Yumas” (“Oh You, You like Foreigners”)’ (p. 133). On the one hand, we are told, this sentence expresses ‘an implicit resentment about the fact that to get hold of anything other than the basics of life, one has to service foreigners, officially or unofficially’. At the same time, it ‘profess[es] mutual love between a Cuban couple, “yo soy tu mangote … tu locote” (“I'm your big mango … your crazy one”), a love underlined in this regeton song by the fact that regeton is danced between Cubans rather than between Cubans and yumas' (p. 133). These first few paragraphs set the stage to address the popularity of regeton through informal distribution networks. If during Jan's visit to Cuba in 2005 regeton was widely heard, on her following visit in the spring of 2006, she recounts, ‘regeton was being officially marginalized’ (p. 136). The problem? ‘Both lyrics and dance movements were coming under fire’ and ‘cultural institutions had reacted against regeton’ (p. 136). Exploring the ‘dancing back to front’ debate that regeton generated, Jan produces snapshopts (‘in situ’) of regeton dancing performed during carnival in Santiago de Cuba in July 2005. Here Jan not only uses her own words to describe the dancing, but also focuses on the dancers' verbalisation of their experiences. She first describes three contrasting situations of regeton dancing: in the first case, everyone enjoys themselves; in the second case, the woman gets annoyed because her man continues to talk to another while she is making undulations from chest to pelvic area and stimulating his crotch area; in the last ‘in situ’ observation, she writes, ‘several pairs of Venezuelan men begin to dance with one women “sandwich”-style between them’ (p. 139).

Most interestingly, from an ethnographic viewpoint, after the dances were over, she asked, ‘How did this make you feel?’ to some of the women and men involved. Only too rarely are audience members asked to give their impressions. But Jan as both an ethnographer and a journalist uses the dancers' answers to go further in her attempt at ‘Reading the dance’ in the following section. Here she confronts her own prejudice against the dance with other (contrasting) views expressed by professional dancers. She also acknowledges how a dance scholar writes that ‘transgressive dance is the key to Latin American dance history’ (p. 144). Still Jan raises the question, ‘does regeton pose a serious set of post-feminist questions?’ (p. 147). She wittingly asks, ‘did other dances like danzón, son, rumba also pose such issues before they were “cleaned up”? Did the new dance moves which fed into regeton in Cuba signify different sexual values embraced by a new generation of women?’ (pp. 147–8). I believe most popular music dances, at some point or another, pose these kinds of questions to some people. Regeton is by no means different from any of these other dances in their own times. The real issue is, who and what does regeton disturb? And what are the positive values of such dances for those who enjoy them? Put another way, what kinds of aesthetic and ethical values does regeton nurture, for whom, against whom and against what?

The last chapter of this section, ‘Control shift’ (2010) presents a very nuanced discussion of censorship in Cuba in the 1990s and onward. Here Jan explores how the issue of freedom of speech became more contested with the ‘influx of new tourists to the island, which fuelled the flow and availability of digital technology. This had an impact on creativity, home-recording possibilities, music distribution and the diversity of the music scene’ (p. 149). Insisting on the necessity to do research before making claims, she writes ‘Trying to gauge censorship in Cuba just by listening to anti-Castro rhetoric … does not produce an accurate picture’ (p. 150). While she signals a number of song lyrics that challenge the status quo, she recognises that several groups such as ‘Los Aldeanos have suffered various instances of what Martin Cloonan has called “prior restriction” and “suppression”’ (p. 150). Yet live shows, she reminds us, have always allowed musicians to take more liberties and to criticise the status quo. According to Jan, the 2009 ‘Paz Sin Fronteras (Peace without Borders) for an audience of more than one million, as well as a massive continental television audience of many more millions, has pushed the barrier further’ (p. 154). Jan's main point is that to be pro-Cuban does not entail being uncritical. Censorship has existed and still exists in Cuba but, as she remarks, it is ‘as complex as it is in the rest of the world’ (p. 155). She ends the chapter with this important advice: ‘I would suggest that the liberally used term “authorities” itself needs unpicking: there is no evidence of any monolithic single authority in Cuba making decisions on censorship. It is important, therefore, to distinguish the balance of power and dialogue that exists …’ (p. 155).

Made up of one chapter, the last part of this book, ‘Profiles of music-makers’, is pure delight. Jan's ability to capture in writing sounds, smiles, movements, tensions as well as laughter is most palpable in this series of articles on some of the most illustrious artists of Latin America and Spain. We wander through the streets of Mexico City, enter the Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba, and hear the singing of a flamenco's leading singer and his daughter in Grenada. We meet Magnificent Mercedes from Argentina in an essay published in 1988, Pedro Luis Ferrer from Cuba (2006), Los de Abajo from Mexico (2006), Eliades Ochoa from Cuba (2007), and the ‘Stars of the New Flamenco’ (2007). We meet artists Jan knows very well, artists whom she met, heard and played over the years in Latin America and in Europe. We learn about the musics they listen to, the transnational networks that inhabit their lives, and the places where they perform. As a broadcaster and researcher on world music, she skilfully balances life stories with dialogues about the ways these artists compose, the songs that made them famous, and the instrumentation they favour. Jan's writing informs as well as reveals her empathy and deep knowledge about these artists. The exchanges are lively, engaged and clearly part of much longer conversations. But the few she shares are wonderful to read.

I met Jan through IASPM. We were good friends, even though we met only a few times. As a Caribbeanist, I thought I knew her. But reading this book showed me how little I actually knew of her many contributions to so many fields of enquiry. The essays in this collection offer a rare overview of her work on writing voice, questioning evidence, and probing experience. While they depict Latin American histories in their complexities, they never lose sight of the humans living them. While they celebrate many Latin American artists' remarkable achievements, they never fail to mention at which costs these were made. This is a must-read for Latin Americanists, music researchers, students, activists and music afficionados.