What at first reads like a loose memoir of growing up Jewish in Detroit ends up being a very detailed and widely comprehensive portrait of what makes Motor City's music so special and multifarious. There is no easily-drawn metaphor to stand for this sprawling, often-terrifying, still-volatile metropolis, no cliché to invoke Detroit in a few words as one might find for Chicago or New York. Mark Slobin's youthful life was exposed to an enormous number of ethnic
musics derived from the many peoples throughout the world and America who jostle each other in Detroit; this has collided into an eclectic matrix which has influenced and alimented our whole nation's music.
Mark Slobin was born in wartime Detroit and grew up with classical and folk music backgrounds. His early work on folk music of Afghanistan shifted to studies of Eastern European Jewish music in Europe and America, film music, and theory of ethnomusicology. He spent his career in Wesleyan University's renowned ethnomusicology program and is retired in Manhattan.