“Humanity is divided into two: Masters and Slaves”. So said Aristotle in his fourth-century BC Politics, the starting point for early music maestro Jordi Savall’s latest project to trace the routes, and indeed the musical roots, of what Savall himself calls “the most monstrous of all the man-made institutions created throughout history.”

Savall has tackled some big issues in the past, notably in The Tragedy of the Cathars, and more recent in the memory of Australian audiences in the Helpmann Award-winning The Jerusalem Project, a concert he toured down under in 2014. However, the centuries-old exploitation of Africans by the American and Latin American colonies and their Western ancestors is a massive subject, and Savall rises magnificently to the occasion bringing together 32 musicians from 15 countries and three continents to trace the cross-cultural influences of African music on the nations who engaged in the slave trade between 1444 – the year the Portuguese launched their first major slaving expedition to Guinea – and 1888, the year that slavery was finally abolished in Brazil.

Jordi Savall's Routes of SlaveryJordi Savall’s The Routes of Slavery. Photo © Kevin Yatarola

If that all sounds rather grim, it...