There’s an old, overused quotation attributed to everyone from William Burroughs to Frank Zappa which posits that writing about music is like dancing about architecture and there’s more than a grain of truth to that. Writing about music, in any kind of meaningful way, is difficult. How do you go about capturing sound and the way it affects us in mere words and why even try to when we can just close our eyes and listen?
There’s music on nearly every page of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s follow-up to 2021′s award-winning debut, Open Water. He repeats a phrase about dancing being the way to solve problems like a recurring hook, a riff that the listener whistles long after the song has ended. Stephen, the youngest child of Ghanaian immigrants to London, is finishing school and hopelessly in love with Del. Their relationship goes through ups and downs as does their families’ histories, recounted in flashback by his beloved mother and his brother Raymond, among others.
The economic and emotional trials that beset any family, especially the distance between fathers and sons, are expertly handled but the music, and the language used to describe it, is where the author truly excels. Stephen and Del are both musicians, he plays the trumpet, she the bass. Improvisation is “where we enter a space and lean into the unknown”. When he listens to Miles Davis touching perfection on Kind Of Blue, he wonders “what faith this might have taken, what it might mean to fall forwards into the vastness of possibility”. African high-life is “beautiful music which can be a balm to the spirit, can transport us home.”
Stephen’s, and by extension Azumah Nelson’s, taste is flawless and you’ll find yourself reaching for the records of Lauryn Hill, D’Angelo, Fela Kuti, J Dilla, Augustus Pablo and many more as you turn the pages. “Have you tried resisting a good beat?” We’re asked before we’re given the answer: “It’s impossible.”
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This glorious soundtrack carries Stephen through summers that “make light work of time” where “the air vibrates” and memories are forged from joy. The power that music has over us has rarely been better expressed and when Stephen’s father is reunited with the flight case of records he was forced to leave behind in Ghana as a young man, it’s difficult not to well up. Small World resonates and reverberates with the true language of our souls. Drop the needle on it.
