Connections: A World History, Volume 2

"This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

These twelve astonishing tracks are drawn from a broad spectrum of early 70s West African psychedelic classics. Yet the fact that they scarcely registered on the Richter scale of contemporary underground music must surely be one of the greatest ironies of modern popular music, given that western counterculture drew so heavily on the musical, aesthetic and visual traditions of Africa.