RIP Jah Jerry

August 11, 1921 – August 13 2007

A Sprinkling of Dub

Today the ARChive got a package from Sanctuary Records that included some really amazing albums.  In the glamorous world of ARChiving, what happens normally is that material shows up, it gets cataloged and it gets put away.  Now and again, we pull things aside we want to hear and since I opened the box, THIS one went directly into the CD player before any of the others:

WOW is this record good.  It was good when it came out in 1975, and this reissue does NOTHING to hurt its reputation or sound.  If’n you like the dub music, then this is a must MUST have.  Featuring Tommy McCook and King Tubby, better dub you would be hard pressed to find.

In addition to some awesome music, the liner notes are by David Katz, an author whose writing I am always a fan of.  His work is just so filled with tid bits of great information.  For example, he wrote: “In 1954, Tommy travelled with guitarist Ernest Ranglin and other Jamaican musicians to Nassau, capital city of the Bahamas island chain, for an extended engagement at a club called Zanzibar.  When the Zanzibar gig ended the following year, Tommy drifted through various dance bands active on the tourist circuit, where he was frustrated by the emphbasis on calypso and rumba; no one, it seemed, was there to hear jazz, which was all that McCook was motivated to play.”

I think Katz is right – no one was there to hear jazz (I mean, wasn’t that one of the reasons Joe Harriott left Jamaica for England in the early 1950s?).  But I would argue that another factor that gave rise to McCook’s problems in the Bahamas was that the Jamaican musicians working there in the period Katz describes were not members of the Bahamas Musicians Union.  In the mid-1950s, Bahamian musicians become vocal about their belief that the Jamaican musicians working in tourism – of which there were many – were taking away jobs. (How many sax players were there who could compete with Tommy McCook?)  In 1955, around the time McCook’s engagement at Zanzibar “ended,” the Bahamian Musicians Union clamped down on Jamaican musicians working in clubs like Zanzibar.  In fact, period newspaper coverage specifically lists McCook as one of several “offending” musicians.  Shortly after the fracas, many musicians (including McCook) returned to Jamaica where, as Katz so accurately put it, they “drifted” through the tourist circuit – playing calypso, rumba and the occasional mento on bandstands for tourists.  The rest, as they say, is history.  If McCook had been allowed to stay in Bahamas, we might not have had a Skatalites.  Or the Dub Station album.

By the way, those looking for a great book on dub music need look no further than Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.

It’s a fabulous book that’s just come out on the subject and one that any dub mixer should read.  (By the way, party people, Dub is a Weapon – fresh from a tour backing Lee Perry – is having their album release party this Saturday [June 30] at Zebulon, 258 Wythe in Williamsburg.  Go.  Enjoy.  It’ll be awesome.)

dtn

Reggae. ReggaeReggaeReggae.

One afternoon in late 2002 (November?), while I was living in Jamaica doing fieldwork on mento for my dissertation, I bumped into Colby Graham at the National Library’s circulation desk.  I don’t exactly remember why we started talking – maybe someone suggested we compare notes? – but I’m sure glad we did.  Colby was there that day doing some research for his magazine Vintage Boss. I’d not seen Vintage Boss before (it first appeared in May 2002 and the earliest issues were snatched up quickly by the Kingston cognoscenti), but I was struck by the work Colby was doing.  Not only was he searching down and writing about some of the most talked about and often least acknowledged people in Jamaican music history (particularly from the ska, rocksteady and reggae eras), but he seemed to be constanly scouring newspapers and photo archives in search of images that could help him chronicle and reclaim facets of Jamaica’s music history from obscurity.

Much of what he’s found (and continues to uncover) is astonishing, and some of it is now up on the Vintage Boss blog.  For those that grew up in Jamaica, Colby’s work helps enliven the musical past.  For fans of Jamaican music around the world, his work helps contextualize – indeed, helps put faces to – the seemingly innumerable and often anonymous vintage records widely available from stores in the US, stores in Japan, and from vendors on the internet and on eBay.  I understand that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 issues (many on their way) and a dozen interview DVDs.  These should all be more widely available in the coming months – if memory serves, I think he got a distribution deal – but if you just can’t wait, back issues are sometimes available through Ernie B’s.

Point is, I haven’t come across many talking about Vintage Boss and this is a shame, so I want to get the word out.  In my opinion, it provides some of the finest coverage of early Jamaican music and should be required reading by anyone interested in its history.

dtn

Mento, Calypso, The Beat, Oh My!

This month’s issue of The Beat arrived today. Although it’s special because it’s the “25th Annual Bob Marley and the Wailers Collectors Edition,” it has particular meaning for me because it includes two obituaries I wrote about friends who have recently passed: mento singer Alerth Bedasse (lead singer of the 1950s group, the Chin’s Calypso Sextet) and Stanley Beckford, the reggae-mento singer well known throughout Jamaica both for his bawdy 1970s hits and for his Festival Song Contest successes. (These articles appear on pages 63-4 of The Beat; the article about Alerth was originally published in the Jamaica Observer.)

The Beat included a couple photos in the piece, but here are a couple more that don’t appear there. The first is of Stanley rehearsing with the Blue Glaze Mento Band. Stanley’s the one on the far right in a baseball cap

The next is one of Alerth from when we first met in person. The photo was taken at his house and, as you might have guessed, I took the picture while he was singing.

(I took both of these photos and “borrowed” them from my own rarely updated website.)

Shifting gears from Jamaica to Trinidad (and it is a shift because I’m of the opinion that mento and calypso have little to do with one another, in general), I’ve been listening to an amazing box set of Trinidadian calypsos from the Bear Family company called West Indian Rhythm.

 

This set is unbelievable. Its 10 beautifully remastered CDs feature almost every single recording Decca Records made in Trinidad between 1938 and 1940 (talk about complete…it’s missing only one record – an acetate – because there is no extant copy). On this set are not just calypsos, no no; it includes recordings of non-calypso topical songs, of dance bands, of Shango and Shouter Baptist hymns, of carnival chants, and of stick-fighter songs. It is really something to hear.

It’s something to read as well. Included in the box is a glossy, meticulously researched hardcover book of liner notes with essays from Don Hill, Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, John Cowley, Lise Winder, Dick Spottswood, Denis Malins-Smith and Richard Noblett (a name that should be familiar to those interested in recordings of Caribbean music). If only every reissue came with a book so well done….

My point is this: were there ever a collection of Trinidadian calypso music to be considered a “must have,” this is it. If you love calypso and can afford to (I have to warn, it’s kind of pricey), there is ABSOLUTELY no way you will be disappointed. Click here for more info.

(An aside: anthropologist Don Hill hipped me to this set, a gesture for which I’ll be eternally grateful. Don is the consummate calypso scholar; his expertise in this area is well documented, and he’s got the seminal book to prove it.)

I should also add that for those interested in calypso, clicking here will take you to a great online exhibit that compliments this set of recordings. Some of the same people responsible for this great set of CDs were involved in that website’s production; on it, there’s lots of goodies to see, so have a look and enjoy.

dtn