In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Brad Fox’s Another Bone-Swapping Event is a mesmerizing account of his time in the jungles of Peru during the Covid lockdown, specifically of how we heal and how we hurt.
The Hong Kong Review wrote of the book:
“Brad Fox’s Another Bone-Swapping Event is a hypnotic odyssey through transformation, identity, and the unfathomable depths of spiritual and cultural encounter . . . Fox’s narrative is a masterwork of stylistic dexterity and intellectual rigor. It plunges us into the murky, luminous heart of change—the kind that fractures and remakes, that wounds and heals, that challenges the limits of identity itself. This incisive, poetic, and deeply human work invites us all to reconsider what it means to change, and whether change, at its most profound, is never quite what we expect.””
In his own words, here is Brad Fox’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Another Bone-Swapping Event:
Another Bone-Swapping Event tells the story of an unlikely year when I found myself stuck, due to Peru’s draconian lockdown, in the jungles of the upper Amazon. I spent most of the year in the care of Miguel Tapullima, scion of a well-known family of curanderos. We stayed on the family land four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road, in the company of animals and plants, things seen and unseen. Along with a few other New Yorkers—a therapist, a molecular biologist, an ad agent, and a firefighter—I ended up getting a crash course in traditional medicine and music. There were long and vacant afternoons when I walked through the forest or read whatever books I could find, some by the amazing local press Trazos, which publishes high quality paperbacks of regional literature: folkloric, comic, political. The nearest city, Tarapoto, was shut down, so I didn’t get a chance to see the local music scene in action, but I listened and eventually learned a few things. Some of those songs are mentioned in the book. Other songs became associated with my time there or began to mean something new to me while I was there.
1. Sonido 2000 “El Baile de la serpiente”
It was June 2020 and we’d been stuck in the jungle for months. The virus was spreading. We were up the mountain with Miguel, and we sat up through the night in his ceremonial maloca. Miguel had been silent, but now he began talking about death: When will our time come? What happens when we die? Will we be reunited with the departed? He told us the week before, the beloved Tarapoto bandleader Tulio Trigoso came down with COVID and got rushed to the hospital. But as all the oxygen tanks had been sold on the black market, he asphyxiated overnight in his hospital bed.
Imagine, Miguel said, people stealing air right from each other’s lungs.
Here is Trigoso with his band Sonido 2000, playing some classic tropicalismo.
2. Los Cojolites, “Las Poblanas”
Son Jarocho is a music culture from Veracruz, Mexico, known for its strummed jaranas descended from baroque guitars, percussive footwork on raised wooden platforms called tarimas, and call-and-response singing that incorporates improvised and traditional verses. I traveled the Jarocho region with filmmaker Marco Villalobos as he documented musicians in the early 2000s. We spent a lot of time with members of the band Los Cojolites. They’d go on to win a Grammy for their album Sembrando Flores, but I loved the stripped-down production and powerful energy of their early recordings, closer to the sound I heard in the villages around Los Tuxtlas and Jaltipan. This version of Las Poblanas, featuring Noé and Nora Gonzalez, was always a favorite.
High in the mountains, during a week of celebrations and accidents and brushes with death, this song resurfaced in my memory. I found myself singing and thinking of the months we spent in Veracruz, remembering and making up verses of Las Poblanas as I walked alone through the forest.
3 & 4. Los Mirlos, “La Danza de los Mirlos/Cumbia de los Pajaritos” and Los Wemblers, “Danza del petrolero”
We stayed for a while at a closed down lodge along the Shilcayo River, just outside Tarapoto. At some point a guy from Lima moved in to the screened in area next door. He told us he’d left behind his hometown and his job to set off on a new life in the jungle. One afternoon I heard him plucking out a song on his guitar. It had an odd rhythm and a kind of maqam-infused melody. What’s that? I wanted to know. Los Mirlos, he said. Cumbia selvatica. Later he introduced me to an earlier group, Los Wemblers, who wrote this bizarre ode to the regional oil industry: Donde reina el oro negro!
5. Los Shapis, “El Aguajal” — Los Shapis en el Mundo de los Pobres
Later we stayed in a little village along the Cumbaza River. In a house of boarded walls and mud floors, our neighbor Segundo, a chocolatier, kneaded cacao and honey into candies. A little TV ran in the corner as she worked, showing a film from the 1980s. The film follows a group of Andean musicians arriving in Lima, hoping to find their way in the big city. They play in a competition and the crowd likes them, but when they talk to a gringo record executive, he doesn’t believe anyone wants to hear their music.
“Go back to the sierra!” he shouts.
Noise complaints at rehearsal land them in jail, where they share a cell with a businessman from the mountains like them. When they get out, the businessman finds a Peruvian record label who’ll take them on, and despite a drunken engineer, they manage to record “El Aguajal,” a sweet and melancholic song about sufferings only known to the papaya orchards and palm swamps of the provinces.
It’s a hit, and soon the song rings out over the poor neighborhoods of Lima, under the capital’s signature gray skies.
After misadventures too numerous to recount, the film culminates with the band—Los Shapis—playing a packed arena. With their matching outfits and choreographed dance moves, they are victorious. The sound known as Chicha is born.
6. Los Pihuichos de la Selva, “El Curandero”
The Tapullimas are great musicians, deeply rooted in the traditions and explorations of the region. Miguel seemed to be able to play any instrument he touched. His voice managed to be both light and powerful, with a laughing edge. His nephew Luis’s voice was softer, more searching, sometimes free and visionary. His son Jonathan had a high, mischievous tone, with a cadence that resembles earlier regional singers like Juanita López, aka La Chamita, heard on this classic track by Andrés Vargas Pinedo.
Pinedo was born an hour away from where we were, near Yurimaguas, and he was of the generation of Miguel’s father. Blinded by medical malpractice as a child, his brother cut a piece of sugarcane into a rudimentary Andean flute and discovered Pinedo’s remarkable talent. He eventually traveled to Lima, learned to read braille, and founded Los Pihuichos de la Selva. The group recorded two groundbreaking LPs, now classics. According to the tracknotes (by Peruvian Youtube channel Aviruka) as of 2018 Pinedo was living precariously in Lima, picking up shifts at the Tottus supermarket in the district of San Isidro, or playing his flute out front.
7. Saša Zurovac, “Na morskom plavom žalu”
Miguel asked me to sing, and I had no experience singing. But that’s how you learn, he said. And how could I say no? At first I moaned and hummed and sang nonsense. Eventually I tried to say some words. The molecular biologist who was with us grew up in Serbia, and sometimes we would sit outside smoking rough jungle cigarettes and speaking that language, which I had learned in my twenties living in the former Yugoslavia. When she was away and no one could understand me, under pressure from Miguel to sing, I found a melody come into my head from an old Yugoslav movie—Do You Remember Dolly Bell. It’s the first film by Emir Kusturica, before cocaine and nationalism addled his brain. It’s a sentimental story about a Sarajevo teenager navigating family ties, youthful desire, and the petty crooks he hangs out with. This song repeats throughout the film. I remembered the sweet voice of Saša Zurovac singing the opening quatrain, which ends O kako sam sretan bio—“O how happy I was.”
8https://open.spotify.com/playlist/20qiDRlA61g0Qdjxv1Mxaf?si=a86244ac10774cf9. Rita Indiana y Los Misterios, “La hora de volvé”
I first heard of Rita Indiana when Jace Clayton had us read her brilliant, highly carbonated novel Papi for the Mudd Up book club. Jace told me about her music and El Juidero was soon on repeat in our house. By 2020, it had been a while since I’d listened to it, but at some point getting online at the abandoned lodge, I saw my old friend Madhu Kaza had posted this video to “La hora de volvé.” The neon colors and dance moves were almost enough to distract me from the song’s pointed lyrics: “Todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron / Al embrujo inconfundible de su sol.” An anthem for my homesickness.
Brad Fox’s The Bathysphere Book was a winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Award and a Washington Post Top Ten Best Book of 2023 and Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 and was called “Hypnotic . . . Beautifully written and beautifully made” by the New York Times. He is the author of the novel To Remain Nameless and has written for The New Yorker, Guernica, Public Domain Review, and The Whitney Biennial.