LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

as these new trends in music and politics were, I was drawn at first not to the rapidly shifting soundscape of urban Jamaica but to the older musical traditions of the countryside that resonated with memories from my childhood.

      So, unlike most foreigners discovering Jamaica’s music, I focused at first on the “traditional” (the “roots”), leaving the “popular” (the “branches”) for later. Even then, I realized that the conventional partitioning of these imagined domains into separate worlds was not to be given too much credence in the Jamaican context. While working in rural Jamaica as a budding ethnomusicologist and participating as often as possible in traditional musical events, I also spent a fair amount of time in record shops sampling the latest reggae tunes and went to my share of booming all-night sound system dances for the pure pleasure of it. These popular musical sites were among the hot spots of an emerging youth-oriented “roots” culture for which a newfound Rastafari consciousness was the main catalyst. One of the fruits of this youth culture was the newly ascendant genre that later was to become known to the world outside Jamaica as “roots reggae.” In those days, young “knotty dreads” in the cultural vanguard would greet one another on the streets of the city with the slogan, “Roots!” The entire society seemed to be turning “forward,” as Rastas would say, through a redemptive appeal to Jamaica’s African past.

      Coexisting with this vibrant youth culture was a still vital older musical world, harboring “folk” forms tied to various traditional social settings that remained a part of daily life—village churches, social dances, wakes, parades, healing ceremonies, communal labor. These too were “roots” musics, although in a much less self-conscious way. And although, at the time, these so-called folk musics were spurned by many urbanizing youths, who saw them as old-fashioned, all of Jamaica’s musics seemed to me to be interconnected, part of the same larger world. The rural quadrille and mento musicians I recorded in the hills of St. Ann in 1975 all knew Bob Marley personally—he had grown up in a neighboring village listening to the very music they still played virtually every weekend—and there was much excitement about the ambitious local boy, a true son of the soil just like them, who was just then starting to take the world by storm. As I continued to move between different parts of Jamaica, exploring its complex and layered social and cultural reality, I began to feel and hear more clearly how much of the old continued to live in the new.

      By the time I finally felt ready to turn my focus to the sound of the city and to seek out some of its creators, more than two decades had passed. In the interim I had gained an abundance of experience in the Jamaican countryside. After spending roughly a year in a Maroon town in the mountains of the eastern part of the island, where I had shared in daily life and learned as much as I could about the unique music of that community, I had returned to Jamaica many times to explore other kinds of music, traveling widely and eventually making field recordings of traditional genres in every parish. I had learned the rudiments of Kumina drumming and had sat in on the bandu drum at ceremonies for the Kongo ancestors. I had been welcomed to Revival Zion and Poco meetings and Pentecostal services. I had learned old songs from mediums possessed by the spirits of long-departed African Bongo men. I had added my voice to the chorus at nine nights (wakes) and had joined in on guitar at quadrille dances and mento sessions. I had faced the fire at Rastafarian Nyabinghi ceremonies. I felt prepared, at last, to approach with both confidence and humility those pioneering studio musicians who years earlier had succeeded in synthesizing their varied Jamaican experiences and broader influences into a new music for their country and, as it turned out, the world.

      THE WORDS AND IMAGES gathered in the following pages reflect my quest to better understand and pay respect to the flesh-and-blood musicians who, during the twentieth century in Jamaica, performed their own version of what the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “the miracle of creolization.” Starting with what seemed to be little or nothing, they came up with more than anyone can say, literally changing the soundscape of the world. I wanted to know their own thoughts on this miracle. To my mind, the only way to approach this question was through face-to-face dialogue.

      The opportunity to turn this dream into a reality came with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, which provided me with the necessary support over the following year and beyond to track down a sizeable proportion of these foundational musicians in person, in the hope of engaging them in conversations of substance. In creating a list of musicians to contact, I relied on performers or other figures in the world of Jamaican music whom I had already met, the scant references to studio musicians in existing publications, and my own intuitions derived from years of listening and paying close attention to Jamaican popular music. As interviewing got under way, I also asked the interviewees to suggest other important musicians who might not yet have made it onto my list.

      What constitutes a “musician” in this context is not always easily definable. I was interested first and foremost in instrumentalists who had been active in Jamaican studios during the critical years of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. However, certain individuals identified primarily as singers also made significant contributions as occasional or regular instrumentalists, while some known mostly for their instrumental contributions also recorded from time to time as singers. Moreover, instrumentalists and singers also occasionally doubled as producers, and the opposite could also occur (though less often)—a person known mostly as a producer might perform in an instrumental or vocal role. In keeping with this fluidity, this book includes both instrumentalists and singers, as well as a handful of exceptional producers who are widely acknowledged for the creative ideas they brought to the studio. However, by choice, I have featured a preponderance of instrumentalists. Also appearing are a smaller but still substantial number of recording artists who worked almost entirely as singers. Among these singers are some who never played any instruments in recording sessions. The individuals in the latter category were included because they were credited by many of the musicians interviewed as important songwriters or arrangers, or because I was aware that they had played prominent roles of various other kinds in popular music and had regularly attended and observed studio sessions during critical periods in the music’s development. Finally, to give a sense of the interconnectedness of Jamaican music as a whole, I have included alongside these professional musicians and singers a number of traditional musicians I have recorded and photographed over the years, whose musical and social worlds overlap to varying degrees and in numerous ways with the musical experiences and repertoires of these same session musicians.

      Once I had tracked them down, I found that the studio musicians whose images appear here were more than ready to talk. Most were quick to express their frustration at the neglect from which they had suffered and eager to set the record straight by testifying to the way things had really worked in the studios in the old days. Both they and I knew that the credit they deserved was overdue. Beyond our shared wish to correct the record, I wanted to engage these artists in a serious dialogue about the meaning of the new music they had fashioned in the studios. In their view, where did it really come from? What were their earliest musical experiences, and what kinds of music were they exposed to while growing up? What were they thinking while bringing new forms of music into being in the studios? What about their music mattered most to them? In interviews that lasted between one and four hours, I tried to elicit (or simply keep pace with) their memories and thoughts on the creative “miracle” to which they had contributed, or any other aspect of their careers they deemed especially important.

      MOST OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS that appear in this book were taken immediately after the interviews from which the juxtaposed texts were extracted. When I look at them, they speak to me of the palpable conviction running through these musicians’ words. Most represent self-posed portraits taken on the spur of the moment—though, as I see it, these were special moments produced by the mutually satisfying exchange of thoughts that had come before.

      Of course, only a tiny fraction of what these musicians discussed with me can be reproduced here. In selecting verbatim passages to go with the photographs, I aimed for what seemed to me high points—statements delivered with particular passion and personal conviction. The points made in these passages recur in many of the interviews and would seem to reflect widely held views among Jamaica’s foundational studio musicians. Here I weave these brief individual statements together in a particular order calculated to create a kind of larger conversation that tacks between interconnecting points along a continuum of shared

Скачать книгу