Rowell goes in pursuit of unusual instruments like zithers and Frampton's talk box and the people dedicated to them. ( )

David Rowell, a journalist, writes about following music to where it takes him. To Switzerland in pursuit of an elusive instrument called the hang. To the Talk Box, as popularized by Peter Frampton. To a storage shed in Maryland where a man named Bill plays a 122 piece drum set for hours at a time. To the quest to get the band Yes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On a small-venue tour with his childhood singer-songwriter friend.

A chapter on the Hammond organ, which started as a church and family instrument and became popularized by jazz and rock musicians, is fascinating.

Rowell is as funny as he is intrepid. Regarding the 40 Funky Hits album he sent away for as a kid: “With songs by Little Anthony and the Imperials, Little Caesar and the Romans, Little Richard, and Little Jimmy Dickens, I surmised that rock music and dwarfism went hand in hand.” And “As a little white boy in North Carolina, I had no real understanding of what it meant to be funky – or a need to be.”

Rowell steps out of his comfort zone, and attends a death metal festival in a shirt and tie: “the look of a beleaguered guidance counselor.” He describes the vocals of a particular death metal band as “distorted, high-pitched bleats. It was the sound used in movies by aliens disguised as humans to signal to their kind that they’ve been found out.”

A good, journalistic view of several of the innumerable places music can take us. ( )