by Ian Thomson
Wright’s big break came in 1987, when a pirate radio station in Jamaica appointed him its London deejay. British audiences began to tune in to Radio Supreme just to hear Gladdy play his selections of ska, rocksteady and reggae. Four years later, in 1992, he opened his record shop on Northwold Road opposite the entrance to Abney Park cemetery on Stoke Newington High Street. ‘And sometimes it really humble me,’ he said, ‘people come here and say they recorded every one of my radio shows. Yes, man, my music give them plenty pleasure.’ In December 2005, after fourteen years of trading, the shop closed and Gladdy moved on to the internet for trading. It has been replaced by the inevitable ‘Perfect Fried Chicken’ outlet.
One Friday afternoon, humid after rainfall, I found myself on South Camp Road in south central Kingston. I was looking for the Alpha Boys’ School, a Roman Catholic orphanage founded in 1880 for ‘wayward youth’. The building was protected by high, compoundstyle fences. Sister Maria Goretti, the current superintendent, came to greet me at the entrance and led me across a courtyard surrounded by classrooms, where 165 orphans were learning to read and write. ‘We try to keep the boys in check, ’ she told me. A New Zealander, Sister Goretti had lived in Jamaica for over twenty years, she said.
The orphanage is famed throughout the West Indies for its musical education. Many of Jamaica’s greatest musicians were tutored there, among them the alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, now regarded as a pioneer of free jazz. Harriott had been part of a wave of Caribbean jazzmen who settled in London in the 1950s and early 1960s (the saxophonist Harry Beckett, from Barbados, was a contemporary). In England Harriott began to forge his own version of avant-garde music by fusing a Charlie Parker-style bebop with elements of his own Jamaican musical sensibility. The result was something unique, a lyrical ‘abstract’ jazz of tremendous originality and attack, which emerged independent of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman in the United States. Free Form and Abstract, Harriott’s greatest albums, were commercial flops but are now revered as black British Jamaican modernist works in which Parkerish improvisations zigzag across mento, calypso and other Caribbean dance tempos. Harriott died at the age of 44 in 1972, the year reggae began to filter into Britain with the Jamaican film The Harder They Come. The epitaph on the altoist’s tombstone in Southampton reads: ‘Parker? There’s them over here can play a few aces too.’
Jamaican popular music would not have flourished in the 1960s and 1970s - with magnificent hit after magnificent hit - without the orphanage school on South Camp Road. Its orchestra, originally a drum and fife corps, had furnished the ranks of Jamaican military brass bands; by the 1950s, however, with vinyl recordings of swing and jazz arriving from Black America in the suitcases of Jamaican returnees, it began to produce its own swing and ska-jazz combos.
Greatest among these were the Skatalites, Jamaica’s premier ska ensemble (founded in June 1964), whose trombonist Don Drummond was nine when his mother sent him to the school. Drummond remained a troubled individual and in 1966 he murdered his common-law wife, the singer and rumba dancer Margarita. He died three years later in a Kingston hospital for the insane. Mental illness was not uncommon among the black urban poor in post-colonial Jamaica, and Drummond was most likely schizophrenic. In his hands, however, the trombone took on a melancholic, minor-key sound that mirrored, wonderfully, the Revivalist religiosity of Jamaica.
The school’s bandmaster, Winston ‘Sparrow’ Martin, was rehearsing in a field by the back entrance when I met him. ‘As you were, boys,’ he said, dismissing his class. Martin had known the more famous Don Drummond but taken a different path. He had played with Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, a British ska (or Blue Note) group popular in 1960s London but long since forgotten, and later was a session percussionist on the first Bob Marley and the Wailers album, Catch a Fire. The sound of early Wailers hits, Martin insisted, was due to Alpha musicians. ‘And I’m talking about real musicians,’ he said gravely, ‘not the American-type rap dancehall stuff. That’s not music: it’s computer rhythms. Here at Alpha we preserve the old-style sounds.’
We went upstairs into the music hall, a large, barn-like room containing a blackboard chalked with musical staves and photographs of alumni on the wall. Don Drummond’s trombone, polished to a gleam, was displayed on a shelf above the blackboard. Seats had been arranged on a stage for the musicians. I was to be treated to a concert.
The fourteen-strong Alpha orchestra trooped into the hall. Once seated (a couple of them scowling quizzically at me), Martin exhorted them: ‘I don’t want the wrappings or the tinsel - just the gift! You hear? All right, let’s go!’ The orchestra kicked into ‘Eastern Standard Time’, a Drummond number with elements of a dirge. The trombonists played soulfully, then picked up riproaringly, until the full orchestra joined in, the tune gathered momentum and I felt I was beginning to levitate out of my seat. ‘Yes sir!’ the bandmaster exclaimed. ‘That does my heart very good.’
Next came a mento-calypso called Mango Walk (Jamaica Rumba), composed in 1938 by the Australian musicologist Arthur Benjamin. Martin made quick feints to right and left with his shoulders, marking out the rhythm. Not a false note was played; this was exemplary musicianship: the trumpeter finished his solo and dropped into the background while the clarinets took over, all adding to the harmony until, with ‘Down Comes the Rain’ by the Royals - one of the most haunting of all reggae songs - the band was playing too well to stop. In Alpha hands, even Bert Kaempfert’s saccharine ‘Wonderland by Night’ had an up-tempo beat that could only be Jamaican.
Outside, after the concert, I leaned against a wall and got out a cigarette just to have something to do with my fingers. The Alpha orphans practise every day and they make music that you would not believe. I had been amazed. In the field ahead of me, pupils were sitting in front of their music stands, revising for their Royal School of Music exams. Somewhere saxophone music was being played: it came from the orphanage faintly through the sticky afternoon, and moved me more than I can say. Why? It seemed to belong to calmer times, when independence was briefly enjoyed in Jamaica, and it was assumed that Jamaica would make headway at home and in the wider world. I could not see how this extraordinary institution at the Alpha Boys’ School would last.
Next day I telephoned Carlton Smith of the Tamlins, a vintage reggae trio well known in Jamaica. Kingston’s ‘tougher than tough’ edge was reflected in the Tamlins’ Philly, soul-inflected sound, and I was keen for Smith to give me a tour of Studio One, midtown, where the trio had recorded in the 1970s. I had met Smith earlier on the flight from London. ‘Fus time to Jamaica?’ he enquired - the Tamlins had just toured England and the concerts had gone well. ‘Hackney was a boom - we mash up the place!’
Now I was sitting opposite him in a room upstairs in Halfway Tree’s KFC. ‘How you doin’ mi breddah?’ he greeted me. He had on a furry Kangol cap and a variety of gold chains beneath his leather jacket. With his neat moustache and sharp features he looked dangerous. In fact he was feeling murderous, he said. The other day a man on a motorbike and two others in a car had tailed him from a cash machine in uptown Kingston, and robbed him at gunpoint. Smith had taken aim with his gun (he is always ‘strapped’) but fortunately failed to kill anyone.
‘When they find out who I am - what they done - they’ll die for it,’ Smith said, his eyes hot with anger. ‘Yessir, I’ll put them on ice.’ He lifted up his shirt to reveal the butt of a Glock semi-automatic tucked into his waistband. ‘It’s licensed,’ he said, and added (none too reassuringly), ‘it’s loaded.’
We made our way to Smith’s Mercedes parked in a lot behind the Aquarius recording studio, not far from Studio One. A group of musician friends of his was chatting and smoking there when we arrived. Among them were ‘Bunny’ Simpson and ‘Judge’ Ferguson of the sleek, roots-reggae band the Mighty Diamonds, in white trousers, skintight at the hips, and Hendrix-style fedoras. Simpson, with his broad pockmarked face, greeted Smith affectionately, but Smith was not in the mood. He told Simpson of the muggin
g and his intention to kill the muggers. With a slow smile Simpson told him, ‘You a bad-john, Carlton, you always was.’
A short man in a torn T-shirt was now standing next to me. Smith introduced him as Headley Bennett, the Studio One saxophonist, ex-Alpha School. Bennett, friendly, offered to sell me a copy of his latest CD, Deadley Headley. He had a plastic carrier bag full of them; I bought one. As I stood talking to Bennett, another man joined us. For a long moment he stared at me, then he opened his bag and took out a knife.
‘What you think?’ he asked, tendering me the blade. I hesitated, not saying anything. ‘What’s holdin’ you?’ the knife-carrier said. Was he all right in the head? With a qualm of fear I flicked a finger across the blade. ‘Ah, yes, man, don’t be frighten,’ he smiled, snaggle-toothed. ‘I’se never without a knife, yunnerstand?’ My voice sounded tight as I replied, ‘Never?’ If the man had been trying to make me uncomfortable, he had done a good job. Now he was looking at Carlton Smith; his voice remained low and conversational as he said to him, ‘Your friend like my knife.’ Smith seemed to know the man; so did Bennett, Simpson and Ferguson - they all ignored him.
Smith glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Let’s go,’ he said; I followed him to his expensive German car. He turned on the car radio. Rocksteady by the Melodians - flawless vocal harmonies - drifted on the Kingston night as we lurched over the unsurfaced roads past billboard advertisements offering fantasies of semi-naked, pale-skinned Jamaican women.
It was hard to reconcile Smith’s sweet tremolo of a voice-a tremendous voice in reggae - with his intention to put three muggers on their backs. After meeting a blade-wielding joker in a car park and a pistol-carrying reggae singer, I was ready to think of Jamaican men in terms of guns and violence. Some Jamaican men feel compelled to defend their corner for fear of appearing weak or ‘pussy’. George Walters’s admonition to me in Peckham - ‘Mind how you go out there’ - came back to me as we set off downtown to Studio One on Brentford Road.
Studio One turned out to be a glorified shack; an unlikely birthplace, at any rate, with its decrepit filing cabinets and scuffed linoleum floors, for some of Jamaica’s most sublime music. Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd, the Jamaican jazz enthusiast who took his nickname from the Yorkshire cricketer Alec Coxon, had set up business here in 1963 and in many ways Studio One became the foundation label of reggae. From this shack ‘Sir Coxsone’ (sometimes spelled ‘Coxon’ or ‘Coxson’) launched the careers of, among others, the Skatalites, the Heptones, Alton Ellis, the Abyssinians and the organist Jackie Mittoo. On his death in 2004, at the age of 72, Kingston went into mourning. There was much to mourn. The advent of dancehall music - the digitalised reggae that Jamaicans sometimes call ‘ragga’ - had helped to kill off Studio One’s ordinary human business of recording musicians.
‘Hail up, Tamlin!’ It was Clement Dodd’s widow, Norma Dodd, sitting at the entrance, solemn and imperious. Smith flinched slightly at her address: perhaps it seemed disrespectful to him, coming from a woman. We continued down soundproofed corridors and towards studio doors marked ‘SILENCE’. Then we went into the dusty yard, where the solitary mango tree had provided shade for the young hopefuls as they waited their turn at Dodd’s Sunday morning auditions, Carlton Smith among them.
In Kingston, as elsewhere in the West Indies, one can pass from enclaves of immense wealth to utter desolation in a matter of seconds. So it was that one night I sped from the gleaming Pegasus Hotel, midtown, to the grimy Spanish Town Road, downtown. I was in search of a street party, or passa-passa, organised in Tivoli Gardens by a group of local dons. The time was two in the morning and the dirt road stretching to the housing estate was ghostly. As we sped along, I could smell downtown - the odours were by now familiar: petrol, burning rubber, KFC fat. Now and then we overtook a lorry carrying higglers into Coronation Market, sleepy faces peering at us over the tailgates. Once, long ago, Spanish Town Road had been a prime residential district; a few of the old music hall theatres with their art deco colonnades were still standing. But they were abandoned now, or else they were ‘coke shops’ - crack dens.
Within thirty years of independence, Spanish Town Road had become the territory of the ‘grudgeful’, of crack-heads, and of stickup artists, and was ordinarily dangerous. But tonight was Thursday night - passa-passa night - and any driver seen on the road was under the protection of the Tivoli dons. ‘No violence will be done to us,’ Bas Ogden reassured me as he stepped on the accelerator. All the same, Bas had not stopped at the red lights but had looked both ways instead and accelerated. It was an unwritten rule that you never stop at night at the traffic lights on Spanish Town Road.
My guide, Bas, was an uptown Jamaican with a clear-sighted concern about the plight of his country. Each Thursday for the last three years he has gone downtown to take part in the passa-passa: he liked the music, the deejay’s art, the make-up - and the makebelieve. He offered no visions of downtown remade and rejuvenated: Tivoli Gardens was JLP turf, and parts of it gangster turf. It would remain that way for as long as Jamaica’s immovable two-party system - PNP versus JLP - kept its iron grip on political life.
We arrived at the quarter-mile stretch of the road marked out for the passa-passa. The trees here were festooned with coloured electric light bulbs and their branches glowed invitingly by the roadside stacked with reggae speakerboxes. Ganja mist, resinous and sickly, wafted on the night air. Perhaps 200 people were crowding the street, smoking, drinking and laughing. On the far side, a deejay named Alonzo was scatting and talking over records - ‘toasting’, Jamaicans call it - while moving the crowds. In Jamaica a good deejay must be able to chant in tune with the beat, as well as throw up witty nursery rhymes and nonsense lyrics, pull off verbal thrusts and parries. Jamaicans, not unlike the Irish, have a great admiration for the elegant control of language. And tonight’s deejay, Alonzo, was a master of the turntable or, as Bas put it, ‘lyrically active’.
Bas was a useful man to know and his contact in Tivoli Gardens was George Miles, owner of the ‘Miles Enterprises’ general store which had been trading here since 1944. The store was open and we went in. A dim light came from a bulb hanging from the ceiling. My eyes focused on the stock: luminous Christs, bottles of jinxremoving incense, postcards of the Catholic saints, store-brand corn chips, canned sodas, caramel corn, mini-pretzels, ‘fun-sized’ candy bars, powdered doughnuts, chili-cheese nachos and other American trash. Also on display were jars of skin-lightening cream: in dancehall culture, the more fair-skinned a woman is, the more ‘trash’ or fashionable - hence the blonde wigs also for sale. Marcus Garvey had banned adverts for skin-bleaching chemicals from his ‘black pride’ newspaper Negro World. Bleaching one’s black skin white implies that black skin must be lightened before it can be considered beautiful.
George Miles, an elderly Jamaican Chinese, threw Bas a welcoming glance, and came over to shake my hand. He had on a string vest over a pair of loose-fitting khaki trousers. Like most Chinese in Jamaica he was a Catholic (the Catholic Church is seen in Jamaica as the church of the commercial class), and a man used to dealing with money-a kind of politician. A photograph of the JLP leader Edward Seaga (pronounced ‘Sea-a-ga’) hung on one wall. It might seem strange that politics should still mean so much to the poor of Tivoli Gardens. In Jamaica, though, politics are often purely about resources: if the JLP lost an election, Tivoli Gardens stood to lose the housing schemes and public contracts, the guns and other favours that Seaga’s party had given them in return for their votes.
I asked Miles, ‘Surely Seaga had his ... tricky side?’ (The dark arts of ballot-stuffing and bribery were not unknown to his supporters.) Miles sucked his teeth and gave a smile of kindly contradiction. ‘Seaga was a good man, don’t nobody tell you different.’ The slightest trace of a challenge was detectable in what he said. Miles may have been a lawbreaker (or had a relaxed attitude to the law), but he was a lawmaker as well: a man who was feared.
His store also served as a bar, and it was filling u
p now for the passa-passa. A girl with a gold ankle chain sat at the counter, lifting a bottle of beer to her mouth; I watched her as she sucked on the bottle, blew smoke out of her mouth, sucked. The store seemed to be a refuge for the poor who came here to be ‘uplifted’ by the music. The drinker at the bar with his hunched spine, the woman scarred by burns on her face, the five scrawny youths who said they were part of a dance team called the Gervaise Squad: for a few hours at least they could allay the bitter knowledge that they were not worth much in the eyes of the wealthy.
As the ragga boomed loud from outside, Bas got out his packet of Black Cat cigarettes, shook one loose, stuck it in his mouth and distributed the rest round the bar. He was a man of largesse, evidently; I noticed that Alonzo mentioned his name every time he spun a new record. Yet Bas was careful not to talk to the locals in patwa (Jamaican patois or Creole), which might have insulted their dignity, and possibly led to violence.
Violence is now ingrained in dancehall music, as it is in gangsta rap, which borrowed much from Jamaican deejay styles of delivery, dubbing and ‘toasting’. (Dr Dre’s revered 1992 album, The Chronic, teems with Jamaican influences, even Jamaican voices.) In turn, an element of nightmarish west coast G-funk ghetto violence has influenced Jamaican dancehall with its homophobia, misogyny and celebration of bitches, guns and cash. (‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money,’ harangued the Los Angeles combo N.W.A., in a neat reversal of Marcus Garvey’s vision of ‘black improvement’.) Jamaican dancehall in the twenty-first century seems to present black people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan would use: illiterate, gold-chain-wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. It seems to have lost its moral bearing and declined from street celebration to the degraded soundtrack of venality, with scarcely any ideology left in it.