Billie Holiday was a fantastic subject for a photographer. Whatever the location or situation, whatever the lighting or the angle, the turn of her head or the expression on her face, the result was almost always extraordinary. Here’s an example, taken in Paris by Jean-Claude Bernath in 1958, during the second of her two visits to Europe. It was first used in France’s Jazz Magazine, and is among the images reproduced in a two-volume publication accompanying “Jazz Power!”, an exhibition of the monthly magazine’s photographs and artwork between 1954 and 1974, currently in show at the Rencontres d’Arles, the annual festival of photography.
The first of the two paperback volumes folds out into a panoramic reproduction of spreads from the magazine through those years, from Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Clifford Brown to Sun Ra, Sam Rivers and Sonny Sharrock. It’s a reminder of how, founded by Nicole and Eddy Barclay, nurtured by Frank Ténot and Daniel Filipacchi, with editors including Jacques Souplet, Jean-Louis Ginibre and Philippe Carles, Jazz Magazine did a wonderful job of reflecting the excitement of the music and its evolution during those 20 years. As it still seems to be doing under the current editor in chief, Frédéric Goaty.
The second of the volumes contains a text history of the magazine and full-page A4 reproductions of 22 memorable images from its history, of which the photo of Holiday is one. On the reverse of each is a reproduction of the back of the original print, with its photographer’s stamp and the mark-up pencilled in by the sub-editor or designer responsible for sizing it up and indicating how it was to be cropped it for use.
What you see on the reverse of the Holiday print is a set of marks clearly indicating that the page designer wanted to tighten the image to concentrate the focus on the singer, completely eliminating two of the three men surrounding her. That’s understandable in the light of the editorial priority: a picture of Billie Holiday, not of some bystanders. Looking at it today, more than 60 years later, we’re interested in the context.
Besides Bernath, who also took the image on the cover of Chet Baker’s celebrated album of Bob Zieff tunes, recorded for the Barclay label in Paris in 1954, those whose work is featured in the exhibition and the book include such great names of jazz photography as Jean-Pierre Leloir, Herman Leonard, Giuseppe Pino and Val Wilmer. Under its various editors, Jazz Magazine used their images well, consistent in its desire to stress the role of the emerging black consciousness and of women as full participants in the music.
Twenty-odd years ago I was fortunate enough to be in Arles on the eve of the Rencontres, and I remember the wonderful atmosphere surrounding the festival. No doubt the “Jazz Power!” exhibition would be worth the detour, if such a thing were possible this summer. As things are, this handsome publication will have to do.
In the days when well known modern jazz musicians travelled the country as soloists, performing with local rhythm sections, I was lucky enough to hear the trumpeter Shake Keane at the Riverside Jazz Club in Nottingham, accompanied by the unit from the house band: Tommy Saville on piano, Geoff Pearson on bass and Les Shaw on drums.
This would have been around 1962. I was too young to be allowed official admission to the wooden extension behind the Town Arms pub on Trent Bridge where the weekly sessions took place, but I’d been managing to get in and enjoy the sounds of the regular quintet, completed by the tenor saxophones of Mel Thorpe and John Marshall. Their versions of hip tunes like Nat Adderley’s “Work Song”, his brother Cannonball’s “Sack O’Woe” and Jimmy Heath’s “Big P” gave me my first precious experience of live jazz at close quarters.
I was anxious to hear Keane because I’d been listening to Abstract, the Joe Harriott Quintet album which had earned a five-star review in Down Beat. The trumpeter played an important role in a band that had found its own perspective on the general loosening of the rules then taking place at the sharp end of jazz. Now we can see that the combination of two Caribbean musicians in the front line — Harriott from Jamaica, Keane from St Vincent — gave the music a special flavour.
In person he was physically imposing — 6ft 4in tall, bespectacled, with a full beard — and sonically powerful. I have no memory of what tunes were played but I remember the sound of his flugelhorn in particular, big and warm but avoiding the luscious plumminess that some trumpeters drew from the big-bore horn. When I listen to his recordings now, I hear an improviser whose phrases were full of interesting angles.
Philip Nanton’s newly published Riff: The Shake Keane Story tells us that Ellsworth McGranahan Keane arrived in London in 1952 on the steamship Colombie. Then 25 years old, he had received an excellent education at the Boys’ Grammar School in Kingstown, he had played in bands and orchestras, he had worked as a magistrate’s clerk and a teacher, and he was already a published poet before deciding to join the Windrush generation of emigrants to Britain. His qualifications and aptitudes soon earned him a job on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programme. Before long he was also a member of local jazz scene, while spending two years studying English literature at London University.
He joined forces with Harriott in 1960, and the work they did together — recorded by Denis Preston for the Jazzland and Columbia labels — still sounds fresh, vigorous and imaginative. The other members of the quintet were the always underrated Pat Smythe on piano, Coleridge Goode on bass and Phil Seamen or Bobby Orr on drums. Keane also collaborated with the pianist Michael Garrick, notably on projects with the poet/publisher Jeremy Robson.
You could look at Keane, Harriott, Goode, the saxophonists Harold McNair and Wilton “Bogey” Gaynair and another trumpeter, Harold Beckett, all post-war arrivals from the Caribbean, as giving British modern jazz the kind of creative infusion that was provided later in the 1960s by the refugees from apartheid-era South Africa: Chris McGregor, Johnny Dyani, Dudu Pukwana, Louis Moholo, Mongezi Feza, Harry Miller.
In 1965 Keane accepted an offer to join Kurt Edelhagen’s big band in Cologne. The money was good, the standards were high, and he stayed in Germany for seven years, alongside the likes of Gaynair, the lead altoist Derek Humble and the trombonist Jiggs Whigham. His soloing with the band is featured on a handful of the tracks on a recent Edelhagen three-CD set titled The Unreleased WDR Jazz Recordings 1957-1974. It’s not my kind of big-band jazz — too conventional — but of course it’s very well done.
After leaving Edelhagen he freelanced around Europe before accepting an offer to return to St Vincent in 1973 as the island’s director of culture. A play of his was given its first performance, but the following year a change of government cost him his job, forcing him to find work as a teacher and as a provider of music for tourists. In 1981, fed up, he left the island for New York, and would never return.
Settled into a Caribbean community in Brooklyn, he played a little and wrote poetry but found life hard. In 1989 he returned to the UK to take part in a reunion tour of the Harriott quintet, and two years later he was back again at the behest of his fellow poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, recording an EP with Dennis Bovell and becoming the subject of an Arena documentary made by Anthony Wall. He visited Norway on several occasions during his final years, and it was in Oslo that he died from stomach cancer in 1997.
His story is very well told in Riffs, whose author, also born in St Vincent, does not dodge the difficult marriages or the drinking problem that made him, in the words of the first of his wives, Christiane Ricard, “a difficult and provocative man”. It’s worth noting that they remained in touch, and she gave Nanton a illuminating interview — one one many collected during what was clearly a lengthy and thorough research process — before her death in 2005.
One way and another, Keane wasn’t able to leave the sort of legacy on record that his talent deserved. But this excellent book will help to ensure that his story won’t be forgotten.
* Philip Nanton’s Riffs: The Story of Shake Keane is published by Papilotte Press (www.papilottepress.co.uk). The Kurt Edelhagen set is on the Jazzline Classics/WDR label. Keane’s work with Joe Harriott can be heard on a compilation of three albums — Southern Horizons, Free Form and Abstract — on the Fresh Sounds label.
John Tchicai arrived in New York from his native Denmark in December 1962. Over the next three and a half years the sound of his saxophone became one of the most distinctive elements in jazz’s turbulent New Wave. He was a member of two foundational combos, the New York Contemporary Five and the New York Art Quartet, and took part in New York’s celebrated October Revolution in Jazz in 1964. He appeared with John Coltrane on Ascension, with Archie Shepp on Four for Trane, with Albert Ayler and Don Cherry on New York Eye and Ear Control, and on the first album by the Jazz Composers Orchestra. Then he went home, with other work to do.
Home turned out not to be just Copenhagen, where he founded the group Cadentia Nova Danica. In the years to come he would live in an artists’ colony in Switzerland; in Northern California, where he taught at Davis University; and, from 2001 until his death in 2012, a small village near Perpignan, on the French side of the Pyrenees. His extensive travels also included visits to India, Afghanistan, Iran, Japan, Sierra Leone and Mexico.
The bands he played in and the recordings he made were many. But of equal importance were the lessons and workshops he gave, sharing with young musicians the philosophy developed during the years in which a man born in 1936 to a Danish mother and a Congolese father absorbed musical ideas from around the world.
It was at a workshop in Rotterdam in 1989 that he met Margriet Naber, a young Dutch musician who became his fourth wife and his collaborator for 20 years. She was with him in California — where they had a band called the Archetypes — and France, and although they split up in 2009 and eventually divorced, they continued to live in the same village and she was with him when he died in a nursing home following a stroke. It is from their conversations, her very clear memories and the material he left behind that she has assembled a book which answers the description of a biography in conventional terms but is also, thanks to the close personal and artistic relationship between the author and her subject, something more.
Tchicai’s stories of growing up as a mixed-race boy in a white world are fascinating. His much older half-brother, Kaj Timmermann, formed a popular band called the Harlem Kiddies in 1940, and in 1953 John saw the Stan Kenton Orchestra in Copenhagen. It was hearing Lee Konitz with Kenton that inspired him to take up the alto saxophone, leaving an influence on the lighter, purer sound that made Tchicai’s own alto stand out amid the maelstrom of 1960s free jazz.
Although his many adventures and countless collaborations are part of the narrative, this is not the place to look for a deep analysis of his music. Instead Naber gives us insights into his thoughts and his teaching methods. Like John Stevens (with whom he played at a famous Cambridge concert with Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1969), Tchicai favoured an open and practical approach that encouraged musicians of all levels of ability to express themselves though improvisation, illustrated by the score of a piece which gives the book its title: “A Chaos with Some Kind of Order”. From another example, his instructions are very similar to those Stevens used to give: “…try to anticipate and play some of the same tones in the same moment as other players would do them…”
Poetry was important to Tchicai. He wrote it — a few of his poems are included — and he recited it in his beautifully modulated voice. Naber tells us that he only consented to record with John Coxon and Ashley Wales (of Spring Heel Jack) in 2005 if they agreed to let him read Steve Dalachinsky’s “These Pink Roses”, which appeared as a kind of epilogue to the wonderful album called John Tchicai with Strings. Naber uses appendices to give us his advice on improvising and on building a set list, lead sheets of a handful of his tunes, and an outline discography.
Tchicai also looked after himself, through yoga and other practices. Naber describes his routine: “He got up around 6am and sat down for a meditation of around an hour. Then he would make some tea and a piece of rye bread for breakfast before doing more exercises, for instance pranayama (yoga/breathing exercises). That could also take an hour. After that, he’d eat some more and tend to work. Sometimes this would be musical work, working with notes, with an instrument, a piece of paper, his keyboard or sequencer. Sometimes it would be business work, like writing letters. When he was done with that, often it was lunchtime and John liked to have a hot meal for lunch. We took turns cooking meals. In the afternoon he’d go out to get some air and do chores like going to the post office or to the copyshop to make photocopies of charts and send them to musicians he played with. Or he’d go into nature. In the evening he went to hear music, watched a movie on television, or turned back to music to continue working. He didn’t go to bed late, didn’t smoke and didn’t drink much alcohol. This was John’s rhythm. When he was on tour he also tried to maintain it as much as possible, at least by doing a meditation in the morning. He was always busy, and often it was work-related, but it was always in a relaxed way. He played his musical rhythms in a relaxed way and he did the same with his life-rhythm. It was a nice rhythm to live next to…”
Remembering all the pleasure John’s music gave me on record since the early ’60s and in live performance from the first encounter in Berlin in 1969 to the last at Cafe Oto in 2009, I was delighted to respond to Naber’s request to read and comment on her manuscript before publication. I was able to give a little help, but she had it all there. It’s her great feeling for what he represented, as well as her diligence and persistence, that courses through this intimate and valuable account of his life and work.
* John Tchicai: A Chaos with Some Kind of Order by Margriet Naber is published by Ear Heart Mind Media and is available from http://www.johntchicai.com.John Tchicai with Strings is on the Treader label. The drawing of Tchicai is by the Dutch artist Marte Röling and is from the cover of Mohawk, a 1965 album by the New York Art Quartet, originally released on Fontana.
The world needs a really great Don Cherry biography, one that would do full justice to the story of the man whose collaboration with Ornette Coleman brought a completely new set of attitudes to the business of playing jazz at the end of the 1950s and who then, rather than polishing his laurels, set out on a long and eventful mission to explore the music of the world. Until someone approaches the task with the sort the depth and sensitivity that characterised Robin D. G. Kelley’s study of Thelonious Monk or John Szwed’s Miles Davis biog, a new anthology titled Organic Music Societies will do to be going on with.
A 496-page compendium of pieces, poems, photographs and artwork, it was compiled and edited by Lawrence Kumpf — the curator of the Cecil Taylor exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York five years ago — with Naima Karlsson (Cherry’s granddaughter) and the writer Magnus Nygren, and published by Kumpf’s Brooklyn-based Blank Forms imprint. Writings by early champions Keith Knox and Rita Knox, the Swedish artist and musician Christer Bothén, the curator Ruba Katrib, the music historian Ben Young and the academic Fumi Okiji sit alongside contributions from Moki Cherry, Don’s wife, and Neneh Cherry, his stepdaughter.
It’s full of fascinating stuff, much of it coming from several interviews with Cherry conducted by Knox. In one lengthy reminiscence, he talks about Miles Davis borrowing his pocket trumpet to play on a gig in California, and about Monk coming to see the Coleman quartet at the Five Spot in 1959. Discussing the Argentinian tenorist Gato Barbieri, a member of his band in the ’60s, he says: “Gato is a fantastic man. He’s got so much love in him, automatically in his sound, and he’s paid a lot of dues, he’s come a long way from where he’s from, down in Buenos Aires. You can hear that in his sound — it’s one of those sounds that puts the wind in your face.”
One of those sounds that puts the wind in your face. What a great thing to say, and somehow it seems very typical of the way Cherry heard and felt music, as a part of the elements of the natural world — the response of a man who took as much pleasure from playing the doussn’gouni, the African hunter’s harp, as from his trumpet. Thanks to what he discovered during his travels to Turkey, Morocco, Sweden and elsewhere, he collapsed the distance between the supposedly primitive and the supposedly sophisticated more effectively than any musician I can think of.
There are diaries, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath and an interview with Terry Riley, a conversation with Cherry about his term as artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and a description by Moki of her background in Sweden and how she and Don met in Stockholm in 1963 and what happened next. I suppose you could say it’s a bit of a random selection, but the parts are tied together by the visual element, which includes a large number of interesting photos and a lot of the paintings, fabrics and tapestries with which Moki gave such a strong flavour to her husband’s work when they were used as stage backdrops, costumes, posters and flyers and on the covers of albums like Mu First and Second Parts, Relativity Suite and Organic Music Society.
If the book has a strong flavour of the children-at-play utopianism of the ’60s, when many of the pieces were first published, so be it. You might feel, after leafing through it, that even now, against all the odds, utopianism deserves its chance.
* Organic Music Societies can be ordered from the publisher at http://www.blankforms.org ($20 paperback, $60 hardback).The photograph of Don Cherry is from the book and was taken by Moki Cherry.
A year and a half before his death in 2015 at the age of 75, the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi entered a recording studio for the last time. At the behest of the producer Sun Chung, he spent two days recording the series of solo pieces that make up Hanamichi, the final statement of a remarkable musician.
This certainly qualifies as the kind of late work in which ageing artists refine their work to the point where only the essence is left visible. Kikuchi started out playing conventional jazz, went through a fusion period, and eventually found a truly original voice. From the start of the 1990s he became engaged in a process of stripping away all ornamentation from his playing, something that became apparent in the 1990s in First Meeting, the debut album of Tethered Moon, the trio in which he was joined by the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Paul Motian, and in his solo albums, Attached, After Hours, After Hours 2, Melancholy Gil, and M. Two albums released in the last decade — Sunrise, a trio with Motian and the bassist Thomas Morgan, and a solo concert titled Black Orpheus — brought his discoveries to a wider audience.
Without wishing to fall for a cultural stereotype, it can fairly be said that Kikuchi’s playing in his final years recalled the process of Japanese calligraphy described by Bill Evans in his notes for Kind of Blue: the careful preparation of the brush and the ink and the stretching of the parchment, followed by the single spontaneous and indelible gesture. As he slowed his playing right down to the speed of meditation, weighting each note and balancing each phrase, obsessively repeating the lines of melody over and over again with minute variations, Kikuchi found new meanings within Carla Bley’s “Utviklingssang” and Luis Bonfa’s “Manhã de Carnaval”.
Hanamichi takes its title from a phrase meaning “the way of the flowers”, applied to the raised platform through an auditorium on which actors in traditional Japanese theatre enter and leave the stage. It is the most moving of valedictory performances. Kikuchi opens by lightly caressing and examining the romantic contours of the pre-war ballad “Ramona” before producing a mesmerising 11-minute “Summertime” fit to stand among my favourite versions of the great Gershwin song, alongside those by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Booker T and the MGs, Billy Stewart and Albert Ayler.
Two adjacent versions of “My Favourite Things” form the album’s centrepiece. Different in attack and trajectory, they’re like seeing an artist render the same object in aquatint and etching. And they make you think that that Kikuchi could have made an entire album out of this tune, holding it up and turning it slowly to watch the light catch it from different angles. (This is how he operated in solo performance: his 1994 version of “Manhã da Carnaval” was completely different from the one included on Black Orpheus, the 2012 recording of his last public recital, although recognisably the product of the same sensibility.)
They’re followed by a wholly improvised piece displaying the pianist’s characteristic use of the sustain pedal to build overtones, subtly hinting at the sound of bells and a gamelan as the single-note phrases coil around each other, gathering in force before resolving in tranquillity. The programme ends with “Little Abi”, a ballad Kikuchi wrote for his daughter in the 1970s, and which became a signature piece: another lovely tune within which he never ceased to make fresh discoveries.
All in all, this is the most affecting solo piano album I’ve heard since Keith Jarrett’s much-loved The Melody at Night, With You more than 20 years ago. Kikuchi’s lyricism isn’t as obvious as Jarrett’s, but the emotional commitment is apparent in every perfectly deployed note. A fine way to say goodbye.
* The photograph of Masabumi Kikuchi was taken by Tae Cimarosti and appears in the booklet accompanying Hanamichi, which is on the Red Hook label. Attached (BJL), After Hours (Verve), After Hours 2 (PJL), Melancholy Gil (Verve) and M (Media Rings) are now, sadly, unobtainable, although some of them are on YouTube. First Meeting is on Winter & Winter, as are other Tethered Moon albums. Sunrise and Black Orpheus are on ECM.
Summer’s here, more or less, and Joel Selvin’s new book, Hollywood Eden, is a good one to take to the beach, the park or the back garden. Subtitled “Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise”, it’s the story of a group of white kids who poured out of the local high schools — Fairfax, University, Beverly Hills, Hawthorne and Roosevelt — intent on using the medium of the pop song to reflect a certain idea of life as it was lived by the jeunesse dorée of Southern California in the first half of the 1960s.
Employed as the pop columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1972 to 2009, Selvin also also contributed to Rolling Stone, the Melody Maker and other publications. His many books include biographies of Ricky Nelson and Bert Berns. It might seem strange to have a study of the Los Angeles scene from a San Francisco author, and indeed I’ve heard a grumble or two from native LA writers. But Selvin has certainly gathered enough information over the years to give credibility to his account.
This is a polyphonic tale switching back and forth between the stories of Jan and Dean, Kim Fowley, Sandy Nelson, Bruce Johnson and Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Lou Adler, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds and the Mama’s and Papa’s as they proceed from the affluence and optimism of white America in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years to the dawn of the hippie era. The story of Jan Berry and Dean Torrence forms the spine of the book, much of it seen through the eyes of Jill Gibson, Jan’s girlfriend, who briefly replaced Michelle Phillips in the Mama’s and Papa’s and is the author’s principal source.
Berry himself was an interesting character: a confident, ambitious, driven young man who came from a rich family, studied medicine and had a fair amount of musical talent to go with his surf-god looks. In 1964 he and Dean had a hit with “Dead Man’s Curve”, a song about a fatal drag race along Sunset Boulevard between a Corvette Stingray and an E-type Jaguar whose morbid echoes gained an extra resonance two years later when Berry, a notoriously reckless driver, crashed his own Stingray close to that very spot, suffering injuries that effectively ended his career as a teen idol.
Other shadows dapple a mostly sunlit narrative: the motorcycle accident in which Nelson lost a leg, Wilson’s breakdown in 1964, and Adler’s cavalier treatment of Gibson when Phillips reclaimed her place in the group. They add a semblance of depth to a fast-paced book that reads like a proposal for a 10-part Netflix series and will certainly have many readers pulling out favourite tracks from the period (my random selection included J&D’s “I Found a Girl”, the Beach Boys’ “The Little Girl I Once Knew” and Bruce and Terry’s “Summer Means Fun”). The book ends without a hint of the horror that will soon erupt — in the form of the Manson murders — to demolish the security of the privileged caste whose golden hour it portrays.
* Joel Selvin’s Hollywood Eden is published by House of Anansi Press. The photograph is from a picture bag for Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” 45.
A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
The 30-year-old Sheffield-born pianist and composer Andrew Woodhead takes that sound not just as the inspiration but as the practical basis for Pendulums, a new album-length work subtitled “Music for bell-ringers, improvisers and electronics”. The result is a quite stunning achievement in which jazz yet again proves its unique ability to create a constructive interaction with all sorts of outside forms of music.
The bells of St Paul’s, Birmingham — installed 15 years ago in the 18th century church, not far from where Woodhead studied at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire — are the first things we hear in Pendulums, and the last. Eight bellringers are joined by two trumpets, two alto saxophones, two baritone saxophones and Woodhead’s electronic manipulation of the church bells and of various field recordings, including bicycle bells and the chimes of an ice-cream van. This film of a 10-minute section called “Changes” gives a view of the way in which the composer integrates his three basic building blocks, creating something more than just a sound-bed for the improvising soloists. Sometimes he transfers the characteristics of bell-ringing to the wind instruments, as at the beginning of “Tolls/Waves”, where the horns sound unison notes that evolve into a phasing pattern.
I particularly love the way Woodhead uses the four reed instruments to soften the metallic timbre of the church bells and the trumpets, and how he brings out the bells’ overtones to create a universe of sound. There’s quite a lot of free jazz practice here (a reminder that one of Albert Ayler’s most famous works was called “Bells”), notably in the sparring over a simple ostinato transferred from bells to saxophones on “Partials II”, but there’s also an saxophone-chorale introduction to a piece called “Plain Hunt IV” that recalls the Anglican hymnal (and the enigma of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide with Me”).
“Plain Hunt II” begins by processing the ice-cream van chimes into the sound of a spectral church organ before the horns take over with a passage of overlapping long tones, another example of how imaginatively Woodhead is transferring techniques from one set of musical tools to another. Towards the end of this piece the gentle hissing and sizzling of electronics is underscored by the tolling of a single bell: placed at the very heart of this compelling 68-minute suite, it’s a moment of beautiful simplicity.
* Andrew Woodhead’s Pendulums is released on June 11 on the composer’s own Leker label (www.andrewwoodheadmusic.com). Concert performances of the work are scheduled for 14 October 2021 at St Paul’s, Birmingham and 16 October 2021 at St Clement Danes Church, London WC2.The photograph of Woodhead conducting the recording is by Guri Bosh.
Bob Dylan turns 80 today. I commissioned this ink drawing for an issue of Time Out celebrating Dylan’s arrival to play at Earl’s Court in 1978, his first London shows in a dozen years. Ralph Steadman chose to make his image out of Bob’s words. When I left the editorship a few months later, the staff very kindly acquired the original from Ralph and gave it to me as a leaving present. As you might imagine, it’s a precious possession, although not quite as precious as all the songs Bob has placed in the common memory over the past six decades. Many happy returns to him.
It’s 40 years this week since Jamaica came to a halt for the funeral of its most famous son. What follows is an expanded version of the reports I wrote on that extraordinary day for The Times and the French magazine Rock & Folk.
They buried Bob Marley on 21 May 1981 at Nine Mile, the Jamaican hamlet where, 36 years earlier, he had been born. His heavy bronze coffin was carried to the top of the highest hill in the village and placed in a temporary mausoleum which had been painted in the colours of red, green and gold. Alongside Marley’s embalmed corpse, the casket contained his red Gibson Les Paul guitar, a Bible opened at Psalm 23, and a stalk of ganja placed there by his widow, Rita, at the end of the formal funeral ceremony.
In London 10 days earlier, a few hours after his death was announced, I’d gone to the Island studios in an old church on Basing Street in Notting Hill. I knew the members of Aswad were scheduled to be there, cutting tracks for a new album in the very basement room where Bob had finished off Catch A Fire, his breakthrough album, in 1972. But it was late, and the musicians had gone home after watching the tributes hastily assembled by the British television networks. The only people left in the building were the caretaker and a member of Aswad’s road crew, both Jamaicans.
“A sad day,” I said to them, unable to think of anything more profound or perceptive.
They raised their eyes, and the roadie paused in the middle of rolling a spliff.
“Jah give,” he said, “and Jah take away.”
And that was the mood in Kingston the following week, when Marley’s body arrived on a flight from Miami. There was no reason to grieve, the Rastas told anyone who asked. Death meant nothing. And Bob hadn’t really gone. He was still among us.
——–ooo0ooo——–
Since Jamaica was at that time almost certainly the only country in the world whose prime minister had once tried his hand at the production of pop records, it was perhaps not surprising that the announcement of the country’s national budget was postponed by several days in order to accommodate what amounted to a state funeral. It was necessary to send out invitations, to construct the mausoleum, and to organise the security at the National Arena, where the main ceremony would be held. And the prime minister, Edward Seaga, had to prepare the euology he would deliver during the service.
On the day before the funeral, the coffin was placed in the National Arena, a large gymnasium-like building. The lid was opened and members of the public were allowed to file past, taking a last look and delivering their final homage. Marley’s head was once more covered with dreadlocks; but this was a wig to cover his bald skull, his own locks having been lost during his treatment for cancer in hospitals in New York, Miami and Mexico, and finally in the Bavarian clinic of Dr Josef Issels.
In Jamaica, everyone claimed to have been Bob’s personal friend and everyone wanted to pay their last respects. The cab driver who picked me up at Norman Manley Airport knew immediately why I was there. When I asked him if he’d known Bob, he replied: “Sure I knew him. He smoked the ‘erb of life.” And he passed his spliff over his shoulder to his friend sitting in the back seat, a policeman.
In a single day, an estimated 100,000 people queued up to pass before Marley’s coffin, some of them returning two or three times. Many couldn’t get in and at times, when the crowd threatened to become unruly, the police used tear gas to thin them out.
The day of the funeral began with a service for family and close friends at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity on Maxfield Street, presided over by His Eminence Abouna Yesehaq, Archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere, who had baptised Marley into membership of his church in New York the previous November. This was just after his triumphal concerts at Madison Square Garden, when his cancer had already been diagnosed. Bob’s baptismal name was Berhane Selassie — “Light of the Trinity”.
At the end of the hour-long service the coffin was transported to the National Arena, where 6,000 members of the congregation were assembled under the eyes of television cameras and reporters from around the world. Above the entrance to the hall, a huge banner proclaimed: “Funeral Service of the Honourable Robert Nesta Marley, OM”. The Order of Merit had been conferred on him by Seaga a few weeks before his death.
The casket was carried into the hall on the shoulders of a score of white-jacketed guards of the Jamaican Defence Force. Inside as well as out, a public address system blasted out Bob’s records, while in the surrounding avenues the hawkers of badges and posters worked the large crowd who had arrived without invitations and were prepared to listen to the ceremony over the loudspeakers.
“Babylon system is a vampire,” Bob’s voice wailed above the heads of the young soldiers who had rested their rifles against the temporary barriers. The coffin was deposited on a table in the middle of the broad stage and covered with two flags, the green, gold and black of Jamaica and the green, gold and red of Ethiopia. The stage decor was the work of Neville Garrick, the graphic designer who had become the art director of Tuff Gong, Marley’s record label, and the creator of all the Wailers’ sleeve art from Rastaman Vibration to Uprising. The rows of temporary seating on the arena floor were reserved for invited guests, but the balconies were open to the public and filled up quickly. Among the spectators were many small figures in the neat uniforms of Jamaican schoolchildren, given the day off from their lessons. On the floor, the rows were marked with signs: Family, Government, Press, Twelve Tribes of Israel, Musicians.
Photographers swiftly surrounded the seats reserved for the family as Cedella Booker, Bob’s mother, took her place, followed by his widow and some of his children, including his sons Ziggy, Stevie, Robert Jr and Julian, and his daughters Cedella and Stephanie. Applause saluted the dignified entry of Michael Manley, the former prime minister, whose pro-Cuba policies had provoked the disastrous enmity of the United States and the International Monetary Fund, and who had been deposed by Seaga at a general election six months earlier. The warmth of the welcome indicated that the Rastafarians, in particular, still saw Manley as the friend of the poor and the oppressed, and the contrast was obvious with the polite but tepid reception accorded to Seaga, who hurried to his seat practically engulfed by a crowd of uniformed guards.
Rumours of the presence of Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack turned out to be false. But the governor-general of Jamaica, Sir Florizel Glasspole, ON, GCMG, CD, the Queen of England’s representative, arrived from his official residence, the palatial King’s House, to provide an appropriate symbol of the island’s colonial history, a living reminder of the origins of most of those present, whose ancestors had been brought from Africa four centuries earlier to form the world’s only entirely slavery-based economy.
The formal guard of the Ethiopian Church, elderly men and women in white robes striped with the Rasta colours, took their places around the coffin. The stage was soon filled with the elders of the church, in robes of varied and vivid design. On the right of the platform a riser had been prepared for the church choir and for the United Africa Band, a group comprised of several percussionists, a bass guitarist and an organist, directed by Brother Cedric Brooks, the saxophonist more often found at the head of the band of Count Ossie, known as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. On the left, another riser was covered with amplifiers, keyboards and the drums, all stencilled with the legend “Bob Marley and the Wailers”.
A voice came over the PA. “Brothers and sisters, this is a funeral service for Bob Marley. Please don’t forget that. The selling of all merchandise must stop now.” In the row in front of me, the producer Harry J, accompanied by his protegée, the singer Sheila Hilton, was in the middle of a conversation with a neighbouring Rasta wearing a red, green and gold tam o’shanter. “There has to be revolution to get a solution,” the Rasta said. Harry J, immaculate in his glossy silk suit, didn’t seem to be in agreement. (I had last seen Harry J outside his studio nine years earlier, during the Catch A Fire sessions, when he had taken a silver Smith & Wesson revolver out of the glove compartment of his Oldsmobile and tucked it into his shoulder holster before heading inside. I wondered if he was wearing it to the funeral, but didn’t ask.)
A little while after the scheduled hour of 11 o’clock, the service began with a hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past”, led by Cedric Brooks and accompanied by his drummers. As the old Anglican melody died away, His Eminence Abouna Yesehaq, standing beneath a parasol held by an acolyte, read passages from the Anaphora of St John, Son of Thunder and from the Anaphora of St Mary in Geez and Amharic, the ancient tongues of Ethiopia. “Jah!” came the answering salutation from some members of the audience, clad in the raiment of the Twelve Tribes. “Rastafari!”
The Governor General stepped forward to read the first lesson, taken from the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verses 20-38: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” The congregation sang another hymn, coincidentally a favourite of the late Elvis Presley: “Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee / How great Thou art, how great Thou art.” Michael Manley, in his guise as Leader of the Opposition, read from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter three, verses 7-13: “Therefore, brethren, we were comforted over you in all our affliction and distress by your faith / For now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord.”
Next, to the delight of the Rastafarians on the floor and in the balcony, it was the turn of Allan “Skill” Cole, Jamaica’s finest footballer and one of the dead man’s closest friends. His appearance barely tolerated by the elders of the Ethiopian Church, Cole had been scheduled to read from Psalm 68, which bears the subtitle “To the chief Musician, a Psalm or Song of David.” Instead, ignoring the text prepared for him by the elders, he announced that he intended to deliver passages from Corinthians and Isaiah particularly dear to Rasta hearts. Mutterings and shufflings among the church dignitaries on the platform were countered by the sounds of delighted approval from those clad, like Cole, in the robes of the Twelve Tribes. Their mood turned to riotous glee as the footballer refused to heed furious requests to leave the platform, instead continuing with his reading and finishing off by returning to his seat in triumph.
The Archbishop recovered himself in time to read the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” — and to lead the Lord’s Prayer before Edward Seaga, once a producer of ska records, made his appearance at the lectern to deliver his eulogy, which was memorable only for his closing benediction: “May his soul rest,” said the man in the business suit, “in the arms of Jah Rastafari.” Even the Twelve Tribes, otherwise opposed to Seaga’s worldview in every particular, could scarce forbear to cheer this unusually explicit acknowledgement of their existence within Jamaican society.
When the time came for the Archbishop to deliver his address, he took the opportunity to take his revenge on the seditious “Skill” Cole in the form of a direct message to the Rastas in the hall. Why advocate repatriation to Africa, he said, when it would profit them more to seek a better life in Jamaica? “Jah!” they shouted in defiant response to his words. “Rastafari!”
The most extraordinary moment of the ceremony, the most beautiful and the most African, came when the Wailers mounted the stage. The members of the Marley’s old band took over as Junior Marvin directed the guitarist Al Anderson, the bass and drums duo of Aston “Family Man” Barrett and his brother Carlie, and Alvin “Seeco” Patterson, the veteran percussionist. Ibo, Third World’s keyboards player, took the place of Tyrone Downie, who had arrived that morning wearing the robes of the Twelve Tribes but had been mysteriously denied entrance to the Arena. The I-Threes (Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffith) sang “Rastaman Chant” to a ponderous and mournful rhythm, before the Wailers struck up “Natural Mystic”.
It was during this song, while the crowd was getting to its feet and moving towards the edge of the stage to join what had suddenly been transformed from a solemn obsequy to a celebration of the dead man’s spirit, that Ziggy and Stevie Marley could be seen, dancing among the musicians. Respectively aged eight and six, identically dressed in maroon suits and white shoes, they performed joyous imitations of their late father’s skanking stage dance, and the resemblance was such that the crowd gasped at the sight. When the mixing engineer superimposed a recording of Bob’s voice above the band’s heavyweight dub rhythm, accompanied by waves of cheering from a concert audience, the effect was hallucinatory.
It was Cedella Booker, Bob’s mother, who closed the performance. Accompanied by two other women singers, she delivered “Amen” — a song first recorded by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, whose music had inspired the Wailers’ earliest efforts — in a powerful gospel voice, the crowd swaying to the rhythm. When she finished, the musicians put down their instruments, lifted the coffin on to their shoulders and carried it from the stage, followed by the family and other mourners through the hall and out into the roadway where, after the crowd had been moved aside, it was placed in a flatbed hearse, ready to begin the 50-mile journey back to where Bob Marley’s life had begun.
——–ooo0ooo——–
As the cortège left Kingston, it passed in front of the house at 56 Hope Road, which Chris Blackwell had given to Marley to be the Wailers’ hometown headquarters. Inside the house, a wall still bore the holes from the bullets that had narrowly failed to kill Bob during what appeared to be a politically motivated attack by a gunman in 1976, while Jamaica was under martial law.
Then the hearse passed the Alpha Catholic Boys’ School on South Camp Road, where many of Jamaica’s finest musicians — Don Drummond, Joe Harriott, Tommy McCook, Vin Gordon, Rico Rodriguez — had learned to play, under the direction of Ruben Delgado, an inspiring teacher. The current generation of pupils now stood outside to sing “No Woman, No Cry” as the procession headed towards Marcus Garvey Drive and out of the city on the road to Spanish Town.
Crossing the parish of St Catherine to the town of Bog Walk, where the road splits right towards Port Maria and left to Ocho Rios, the cars turned north-west through Linstead and Moneague, with the 1,000ft peak of Mount Friendship to the east, taking the left fork past Claremont into the parish of St Ann, skirting the northern foothills of the Dry Harbour Mountains and on through Brown’s Town. As they approached each settlement, the passengers could see that people had come out of their houses and schools and farms and workshops to stand by the roadside. Near Cotton Piece the open-backed hearse broke down and the coffin had to be put into a replacement van. Finally, in mid-afternoon, the dead man and his mourners arrived at Nine Mile, a hamlet set at the end of a single-track road among gentle, verdant red-clay hills.
A helicopter buzzed overhead, carrying a film crew, their cameras trained on slopes covered with white-robed figures. Rastas from all over the island had set off early to be in place when the procession arrived. Policeman cradling machine-guns were prepared for trouble yet, despite the crush as the coffin was removed from the hearse and carried up to the small temporary mausoleum, disorder was minimal.
Nine Mile turned out to be little more than a scattering of shanties, with one or two bars and a small single-storey stone building consecrated, according to a hand-written sign, to the use of the Holy Baptist Church of the Fire of God of the Americas. This was a place where workers in the sugar plantations set in the flatlands towards the sea had been allowed to build their modest homes and cultivate their own subsistence crops. It was here, on 6 February 1945, that Cedella Booker had brought a son into the world and that, only a few paces away from the mausoleum, in a two-room shack measuring about 20ft by 5ft, Bob and Rita Marley had returned for a year or two at the end of the ’60s, and here that they nurtured their own first child.
After a brief ceremony of interment, the convoy departed, followed by the police. Only the Rastas remained, wandering to and fro around the village and across the hills. For the last time, Junior Marvin and Neville Garrick climbed the little mound up to the mausoleum, picking their way through empty Red Stripe cans, the music they had helped to send around the world now throbbing from a dozen portable cassette players.
As the light began to fail, the vendors of ice creams and soft drinks began to pack up. The thump of the helicopter’s rotors receded as it wheeled away and headed south, back to Kingston. The white-robed members of the Twelve Tribes melted into the gathering dusk. Bob had come home.
thebluemoment.com 