Ska or Jazz !

[Sir X]

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[Sir X]

Jazz to Ska Mania
1
Monty Alexander and Ernest Ranglin
By Richard Mallory Allnutt
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Detail from 1961 LP All Star Top Hits on the Coxsone label
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Duke Ellington snaps his fingers to Count Ossie (seated, left) and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari
By Sonny Bradshaw
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Jamaica All Stars circa 1947 or 1948
By Sonny Bradshaw
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Ernest Ranglin and Monty Alexander in Kingston, Jamaica, January 2004
By Christopher Porter
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Ernest Ranglin is seated behind saxophonist-bandleader Eric Deans, in the late '40s or early '50s
By Urban Image
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A flyer for an "Xmas Bonanza" concert
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Don Drummond
By Courtesy of Studio One
9
Jah Jerry Haynes
By David Corio
10
Johnny "Dizzy" Moore
By Keith Wattkis
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Late 50's all star band
By Sonny Bradshaw
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July/August 2004
Christopher Porter


You don't drive so much as duck and weave in Kingston. Like much of the city, many streets in Jamaica's capital need fixing, and the combination of potholes, narrow paths and seemingly random traffic patterns can make for a wild ride. The horn is your best friend.

Pianist Monty Alexander, 60, and guitarist Ernest Ranglin, 72, are sitting side by side in our van. Neither one seems particularly happy about being in Kingston today. It's an intense place. Touring the city brings up many good memories for these two friends, but Alexander and Ranglin see the harsh economic realities that plague the cultural center of Jamaica and their thoughts turn bittersweet.

The almost preternaturally calm Ranglin, who still lives in Jamaica, far away from these bumpy streets near Ocho Rios on the North Coast, doesn't say too much as we drive. Alexander is mostly silent as well, but he's anxiously taking in the scene of the city he called home until he moved with his family to Miami in 1962. He was 17 then, and how Kingston has changed since. A couple times during our trip Alexander wonders if we are in a safe area. Our driver assures him we are fine each time, and Alexander goes back to gazing upon Kingston, where almost 700,000 people-about a third of the island's population-live, with shantytowns right next to gated yards.

It's not until we pull up to 220 Marcus Garvey Drive that Alexander and Ranglin become animated. Now called Tuff Gong Recording Studio since the Marley family bought it in 1981, the structure used to be known as Ken Khouri's Federal Recording Studio. It was in this building, located in an industrial part of south Kingston, that history was made.

The studio has been added on to, but Ranglin and Alexander remember the original structure, which is still visible from outside the large metal fence that surrounds the compound.

"Way behind the back there-" Ranglin says.

"-with the zinc roof," Alexander finishes. "That's where all the early sessions took place. I remember I couldn't wait to come out here and buy the saltfish fritter and the Irish moss and all the drinks. But this is where those sessions took place, and Ernie was there and he did all the arranging."

Ranglin nods and says, "Then later I was the musical director at this place for about seven years-early '65 to '72."

The mid-to-late 1950s recording sessions that Alexander is talking about, made by jazz-loving musicians for R&B-oriented producers, provided the foundation for all popular Jamaican music today.

Jazz came early to the island. Daniel Neely is an ethnomusicologist who studies mento, a calypso-sounding but distinctly Jamaican folk music that came out of the creolization of the quadrille dance songs that slaves were forced to perform for their masters dating back to the 1700s. He has found newspaper references to jazz as far back as the 1920s.

"I have articles with the word jazz used as if it were not a new thing," Neely says. "I can say with certainty that jazz was in Jamaica by the early '20s, if not earlier. In fact, I have read suggestions that jazz was in Jamaica as early as the late teens. It's likely that the Gleaner wouldn't pay attention," he says of the leading Jamaican newspaper, which has published since 1834 and, until relatively recently, ignored downtown cultural trends in favor of the upper crust.

Neely says that the Ward Theatre, which still stands in the heart of downtown Kingston, kept a ledger of its performances. "Along with several concerts by sailors in port in the late teens, there were numerous minstrel groups from America who could have introduced jazz. Also, Marcus Garvey was organizing concerts in the teens," he says, invoking the name of the Jamaican firebrand activist and entrepreneur who is now a national hero. "I don't know if he had jazz in them explicitly, but it's possible that with his international connections jazz got to Jamaica rather quickly. However, it wasn't until the mid-1930s that organized, annual dance-band competitions began being held in Kingston. Some of the bands that competed in these competitions included the King's Rhythm Aces and the Rhythm Raiders. A major performer of that era was Milton McPherson. They were very, very popular."

Carlos Malcolm, 69, remembers his dad playing in one of these musical throwdowns: "In 1936 my father took an orchestra to Jamaica called the Jazz Aristocrats from Panama to play at Liberty Hall in a competition with Jamaican jazz musicians." Malcolm is a trombonist, composer and arranger who formed the Afro-Jamaican Rhythms in 1962 after conversations with Machito and Mongo Santamaria. His group was by far the tightest and most advanced ska group in the era, seamlessly blending Jamaican folk music and jazz and easily mixing harmonic and rhythmic complexities into their always grooving dance-band sound. He lived in Panama as a youth because, like so many other West Indians, his trombone-playing father went there to work on the Panama Canal.

In the early 1940s two U.S. military bases opened in Jamaica, and soldiers and sailors would trade records with the locals, sometimes in exchange for trips to houses of ill repute. A USO club on Old Hope Road in Kingston provided entertainment for the servicemen and work for Jamaican musicians. "World War II really decimated the big bands in the United States," Malcolm says, "but the big bands in Jamaica were going full blast all the way through the war. Because there was no recording industry there, [the music has] been lost."

"The whole tradition of the dance bands in Jamaica, a lot of that musicianship was developed on the matrix of jazz," says longtime Jamaican broadcaster Dermot Hussey, now a programmer for XM Satellite Radio. "Those musicians used to play arrangements and scores that they got out of England, largely, but also Ellington or Erskine Hawkins or whoever. There was always a love for the music in the country, especially among the musicians. When jazz changed to bebop in the '40s, Jamaican musicians were right there and abreast of what was happening. American music has really been like a colonizing agent in that it really has permeated almost every corner of the globe."

The island's 1940s big-band scene birthed two groups of musicians: those who left Jamaica to make their mark on the jazz world, such as trumpeter Dizzy Reece, who left for England in 1948, and alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, who left in 1951, and those who continued to play the hotel and club circuit right through the birth of Jamaica's indigenous recording industry in the 1950s and new musical creations in the 1960s.

The elder statesman of jazz in Jamaica is trumpeter Sonny Bradshaw, a lifelong Kingston resident. The 78-year-old is sitting in his comfy home in a T-shirt promoting the Ocho Rios Jazz Festival, which he and his wife, singer Myrna Hague-Bradshaw, have run for the past 14 years. Despite being in the hospital the day before because of a health scare, brought about by stress from producing a recent big-band concert, Bradshaw is chatty and amiable.

Jamaica had just one radio station, ZQI, in the 1940s and through most of the '50s, so many people used to tune in overseas stations from as far away as WLAC in Nashville to get their music fix. "I was a radio experimenter, ham radio," Bradshaw says. "I used to build my own little set, have my headphones on. At home, at work, I listen straight through the night. I could get Armed Forces Radio Service, all the American stations and now again BBC. Miami [WINZ], Cuba, all that Latin music and all that music from New Orleans. I learned [about jazz] on radio."

Malcolm also cites the influence of Armed Forces Radio Service, which broadcast in Panama to entertain the U.S. troops working on the Canal and played Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz greats. "The first time I heard Count Basie's 'One O'Clock Jump,' I said, 'Hey, this thing is for me,'" Malcolm laughs. "The lope of that dotted eighth [note] chugs you along like a locomotive. But I discovered that a dotted eighth is not really a dotted eighth; it's a triplet with the tongue missing-the middle note is missing, and that is really the essence of jazz."

To get even deeper into the music he heard on the radio, Bradshaw got a job at an instrument and sheet-music store, Montague's Musicke. "While I was there my father got me a trumpet-an old trumpet. During that time there were those bands on the road, and I wanted to get in one of them. At that time the musicians were coming out of Alpha, and they were the ones getting the training."

Alpha Boys' School is a legendary institution in Jamaican music. The Sisters of Mercy established the home in 1884 as a Catholic home for wayward boys, but over the years it has produced some of the island's top musicians under the guiding hands of dedicated bandmasters and a tiny woman named Sister Mary Ignatius Davies. Sister Iggy, as she was affectionately known, died in 2003 at 81 after having served at Alpha since 1939. Some of Alpha's most famous musicians include trumpeter Reece, alto saxophonist Harriott, tenor saxophonist Cedric "Im" Brooks and more, plus four members of the original Skatalites: saxophonists Tommy McCook and Lester Sterling, trombonist Don Drummond and trumpeter Johnny "Dizzy" Moore.

"She's great," Reece, 73, says of Davies. "I think she bought Blues in Trinity, one of my first records. She used to have all my records."

"She was a jazz listener," Bradshaw says of Davies. "The music of the day-she was with it. Swing, then to the bebop period, and then we come to the Jamaican period from '59-ska, rocksteady and reggae." In fact, Sister Iggy would even have sound-system dances for her pupils, where she would spin records from her personal collection.

"Most of the musicians who came out of Alpha were largely jazz musicians," Hussey says, "but they were mostly learning on their own. Hearing recordings and sitting down and assimilating the stuff. Don Drummond was apparently very fond of Bennie Green. Tommy McCook was a great admirer of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. If you listen to some of McCook's solos you hear Coltrane's influence. And Johnny 'Dizzy' Moore was influenced by Dizzy Gillespie."

http://jazztimes.com/articles/14829-jazz-to-ska-mania


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[Sir X]

Got a 10 year old kid hooked this weekened said he was learning to play Jazz and he is a trombonist sent him a video link with Don D , Confuscious and the skatallites and he said.......oww my god , thanks very much ! Cant stop Skazzing ..lol