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Rocksteady 7 blog
So....the new Rocksteady 7 album, Get Back Up, is finally finished.
By finished, I mean the master has been finalized. The artwork is still being tweaked.
So I can look forward to these songs finally seeing the light of day in the near future.
Currently, the Euro release for Get Back UP! is gonna be with Brixton Records (
www.brixtonrecords.com). And the Japanese release is gonna be with Disk Union.
A 45 is coming out on golden singles records also out of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />....spain.....
www.myspace.com/thegoldensinglesFor the USA/Canada, Im probably gonna end up putting out the cd myself. And then with the help of Nomadic Wax ....Ill.... get it up on the different websites (Itunes, Emusic etc etc).
Well, the point to this blog is not to just make a blatant commercial plug (or plea...Im begging you...someone buy my music!!!! hehehe).....its to talk about Jazz and Jamaican rhythms.
“You also need to more than the root, third, and fifth because that limits you.
You must spread out with the seventh, the sixth, even the ninth when called for”—Roland Alphonso
Improvising over ska beats, rocksteady beats, bingi, jump up, 60's reggae, roots reggae etc etc is something I've been working on for a long time, and its near and dear to my heart.
For whatever reason, this guy (me) who grew up in Socal suburbia and then lived in NYC for the last 17 years, has been obsessed with playing saxophone over these rhythms. From the first time I heard Saxa of the Beat, I just cant stop listening to this stuff.
Its always amazing to me how few players try to mix jazz and Jamaican rhythms.
Afro Cuban music and Jazz have a long history.
Brazillians beats like Samba and Bossa Nova are also typical parts of a jazz bands repertory.
There are seen as “natural” things to play.
Even the occasional calypso beat pops up thanks to Sonny Rollins and his “....st. Thomas.....”
Ask the average jazz band to play reggae and you are gonna get cheesy grins, sarcastic “ya mons”, and some of the cheesiest lounge music you ever heard.
But in ....Jamaica.... and the Jamaican diaspora, there is a long tradition of playing Jazz and Jamaican music together.
Basically, the roots of this go back to ....Jamaica.... in the 40s/50s (at least). The Jamaicans had big bands for hotels, or for different schools and niteclubs, or for the military, and the guys educated in this music started playing over the mento and other rhythms that were the folk music of ....Jamaica.....
At the same time they started hearing Jump Blues and other music from the american south. So you start getting some pretty good improvisers who have a unique sound.
Some of the early guys like Bobby Gayanair and Val Bennet you can check out on Laurel Aitken’s early tracks - check out "Laurel Aitken - The Pioneer of Jamaican Music" on the Reggae Retro label.
Add the burru and bingi rhythms of Count Ossie's percussion centered group. Guys like Rico Rodriguez and Don Drummond would hang out with this group of hand drummers and they rhythms (and Rastafarian ideas) ended up in Ska and later Reggae.
Check out “Remembering Count Ossie” a retrospective cd to hear how this stuff started.
Or Prince Buster’s productions of “Oh Carolina” and “Chubby” also feature Count Ossie.
Later, the ska sound gets codified around a cadre of musicians that is known as the Skatalites.
Their drummer, Lloyd Knibb, sets the standard for the Jamaican ska beat and it becomes its own thing, very distinctive from its influences.
There is the basic ska beat and then he also did a ska bossa, burru, and some swingier beats that were more similar to the Jump Blues roots of ska.
The Skatalites also improvised.
They played covers of songs by Mongo Santemaria, Lee Morgan, and Sonny Rollins.
They basically grabbed musical themes from all over the place and would give them a different name.
For example, Sidewinder became Malcolm X.
Hammerhead became ....Phoenix.. ..City.....
There were also a couple of originals, mostly written by Don Drummond.
For a short time in the mid-60s instrumental music reigned supreme in ....Jamaica.... but this ended with the Rocksteady era.
So far, for me, at least this is a pretty boilerplate history of Jamaican music.
I guess what is less know what happens to the improvisers after ska. Although instrumentals become secondary
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In the second half of the sixties, in the rocksteady era and early Reggae era there were
lots of organ instrumentals by Jackie Mittoo, Glen Adams, Winston Wright, Lloyd Charmers and others. Jackie Mittoo’s Evening Time is a personal favorite.
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A lot of these songs were “versions.” With the event of multi-tracking, a producer like Coxsonne Dodd could do a lot of versions of the same rhythm. Different vocals. Organ versions. Saxophone versions. Percussion versions. Whatever.
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Unfortunately, this led to less stretching out and less songwriting specially for improvising.
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There are some exceptions. The most influential for me is Cedric Brooks who made a bunch of great albums in the late 60s through the mid-1970s as musical director of Count Ossie’s Mystic Revelations of Rastafari and then later with his own Light of Saba group. These albums like “Tales of Mozambique” and “Groundation”
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Another guy who never gave up on jazz-reggae hybrids is Rico Rodriguez. His blue note Lp, “Man from Wareika” is fantastic. It only has short solos but they are powerful. The themes are fantastic and the rhythm section is a serious reggae section.
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With the rise of Dub and Roots Reggae in the 70s you get a new Reggae instrumental style centered around the melodica. This minimalist but brilliant style is best exemplified by Augustus Pablo.
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Yeah, so to this day there are still a fair amount of instrumental reggae records. Dean Frasier is probably the best known saxophone player after the Roland Al/Tommy Mc era. He gots huge chops and big sound but like a lot of guys of his generation this “smooth jazz” influence starts to creep in. A lot of contemporary reggae instrumental albums are very easy listening music that is great for a dentist chair.
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In addition to the guys improvising over Ska, Reggae, etc., there have been a fair amount of Jamaican musicians who played American style jazz with varying degrees of success like Roy Burrowes, Dizzy Reece, and Joe Harriot. Joe Harriot is very experimental. Played a sort of strange parallel style to Ornette Coleman with a little bit of a calypso sensibility. Pretty cool stuff.
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Later on you have Monty Alexander and Ernest Ranglin. They did a lot of straight ahead jazz but they have also messed around reggae rhythms. Ernest Ranglin’s “Below the Bassline” is one of my favorites. Monty’s stuff is infuriating to me cause it can be so great one song, for example, his version of Exodus (film theme) into Exodus (Bob Marley) is brilliant. But then he can do the cheesiest lounge reggae with steel drums the next.
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As ska and reggae went around the globe, you get more and more non-Jamaicans experimenting with these rhythms with varying degrees of success.
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Georgie Fame, the british Rnb artist, had several Carribean musicians in his band and messed around with ska themes occasionally.
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Herbie Mann famous for his mix of jazz, latin, and brazillian music also did a Reggae album. It has a lot of good Jamaican musicians playing on it but I cant recommend it as an album. Its just lightweight material. Fluff a rama.
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Plus in the ....UK.... there were a fair amount of 1st and 2nd generation carribean musicians like Courtney Pine who mostly play straight ahead jazz or funk but will also work in reggae themes.
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When the Two Tone movement hit the ....UK...., guys from the older generation like Rico got a lease on life. None of the younger generation of two tone guys really tried to mix jazz with ska seriously. They were coming out of Punk, Pub Rock, and british pop music. The one exception to this is the Jama Rico album, featuring Rico Rodriguez again, that was put out by Two Tone after the main wave had crested.
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Since the early 90s, you have a lot of non-Jamaican musicians messing around with Ska & Jazz. They are a mix of guys who came out of the Ska scene and wanted to play instrumental music and guys coming out of Jazz who end up in Ska bands.
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Since the 90s, in addition to my own Rocksteady 7, there have been a lot of musicians, mostly outside of ....Jamaica.... who have been messing around with different mixes. ....New York.... Ska-Jazz Ensemble. Skazz. Jazz ....Jamaica..... ....Rotterdam.... Ska Jazz Foundation. ....Tokyo.... Ska Paradise Orchestra. St Petersburg Ska Jazz Collective (You might notice a naming trend for these groups!). The Articles. The Oldians. (finally, some bands without ska, rocksteady, or jazz in their name!).
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My favorite is Joey Altruda’s, Jump with Joey. Their Generations United album done with Roland Alphonso is a great album. It has old ska and reggae mixed with latin and swing. He is one of the main templates for the “neo” traditional bands that have constituted an outcast minority of the Ska movement for the last 15 years.
Its funny. The first time I played “Confucius” (by Don Drummond) for my high school band music teacher he laughed at it. He had asked me to bring in a song that I was listening to. He wanted to hear what the kids in his band were listening to. He laughed at my song. Its just “one chord” he exclaimed!
He couldn’t hear it as serious music because of that. That guy was just one in a long line of people I had to prove the musical validity of the music that I loved.
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Like I said it’s a common prejudice that Im always fighting against that reggae music is simple music played by inferior musicians. Herbie Mann referred to it as “folk music” that is “simple melodically but complex rhythmically.” He went on to say how he preferred Brazillian music because it was also complex harmonically. Another, ....Ill.... leave unnamed member of an influential Ska-Jazz group proclaimed,
“the Harmonic structure is so simple in ska.”
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You see, Im of a different opinion. I remember a certain Jazz musician named Miles Davis. He shocked the Jazz world by writing 2 chord jazz tunes like “So What.” Because of his simplification of the basic harmonies, the soloists were then freed up for more melodic experimentations that often began to use even more complex harmonic concepts.
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A tune like Confucius opens you up to do so much. The repeated riff creates a trance and its up to the soloist to take you to the next level. Obviously you can use a Cminor scale, but you can also play different minor modes, harmonic minor scales, play major riffs against the chords, play blues scales.. the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. As long as you have a strong tone and strong rhythmic statement you can do anything.
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I tried to do a couple different modal things on my first album, Playtime. Specifically the title track which except for the bridge is only two chords, Fmin(9) and Ebmin(9).
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..(pleae forgive me when I write out the chords. These are off the top of my head, so yes, Im gonna make some mistakes! But you should get the idea.)..
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To take issue with Herbie Mann, there is no reason why you cant slip more chord progressions into reggae music and still have it maintain its rhythmic force. Shit, you could play Desafinado and any other bossa standard easily in a reggae style and it would sound great. An example of adding some chords to a standard is rolf’s version of Another You on United Front.
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Here are the chords underneath the solos for the second chorus,
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Ebmaj / Ebmaj / D- / G7 / C- / C- / Eb7 / Abmaj / Db7 / Eb maj / F7 F#dim /
G- Ab7 / G- C7 / F- Bb7 / Ebmaj /
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On my United Front album, I also wrote some tunes like “Baby” and “Come and Get Me” that were decidedly influenced by Miles Davis tunes like “Four” and “Tune Up.” To me they just sound natural. Here are the chords to Baby for example,
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Ebmaj / Eb maj / Eb maj / Eb-7 Ab7 / F- / F- Dbmaj / E 7 / E7 /
G-7 / F#7 / F-7 / Bb7 / G- / F#7 / F-7 / Bb 7 /
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Anyways, I guess this is what is at the heart of the Rocksteady 7’s style. We start with heavy Jamaican rhythms but then we expand upon it. Not to make folk music more “sophisticated” but to take the music we’ve heard before and try to make something that expounds upon it.
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We can take a bingi and swing it, making it a “swingi” and bring out the 6/8 hiding within. We can play a straight ska beat but mess around with a whole tone progression on top of it. And you can also play the blues and that never gets old!
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For me, its all about creating that “trance” state where you are really into the rhythm of the music and then you can fuck around with it by pushing limits while you solo.
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For example, Change of Plans has a whole tone pattern in it but its also a weird blues variation.
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Bb C / D E / Bb7 / Bb7 /
Eb F / G A / Bb7 / Bb7 /
Bb C / Eb F / Bb C / Eb F /
Bb C / Eb F / Bb7 / Bb7 /
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I have a pretty homemade technique. I had a sax teacher analyze my fingering style once. There is a “French” fingering style which is light and fast. A german style which is heavier and harder (surprise surprise). I was diagnosed as having a harder than German style which is somewhere around a caveman style of playing saxophone.
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It should also be music that’s fun to play. I like to honk and squawk and make funny noises on the saxophone. Sometimes I really like just hanging out on the pentatonic scales. I learned a lot about this from listening to Fela Kuti. He has a certain technique that is not virtuoso like Dexter Gordon, but its so individual and works so well with his music that technique is the last thing you think about when you listen to him.
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Shit, Dexter Gordon was definitely not “above” letting out the odd squank on the bottom of his horn for that matter!
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I really look at the harmonics of R7 tunes as different color combinations. Certain chords lend themselves to this, other ones to that. But you can still mix them up. (of course, Im colorblind!)
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Musically, ska, jazz, reggae, afro-cuban, bossa, afro-beat, and Rnb have so much in common I often just think of them as the same music with a common connection…hmmm….to where?...hehehe.
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Anyways, now that Im done with my bluster and bravado, I hope you guys will listen to the new r7 album and enjoy it. Me and the band really went for it. We are trying to make something that is not “new” or “retro” but timeless. Something you will want to keep listening to, again and again.
If you’ve reached this point of the blog, thanks for reading the whole thing.