 |
Hi everyone,
So in my history of American Ska blogs I deliberately avoided doing lots of talking about Jamaican Ska and UK ska. So here are some thoughts.
First, the Jamaicans. I remember Roland and Tommy. The two Tenor Saxophone players for the Skatalites.
Vic was talking to me the other day. He was saying how lucky we were to have heard Roland Alphonso in person. That magical tone he had. So this got me to thinking about these guys. All these memories started flooding back.
I remember the first time I heard them. I got the Skatalites, "Scattered Lights" album. It was a reissue on Alligator records. I used to listen to China Clipper a lot. So different than anything else I was listening to at the time. I can still remember the taste of the chex mix I was eating when I first listened to it.
Basically, this casual listening grew into an obsession. Just looking through my collection, I must have about 15 LPs, several casettes, a couple cds, and several dozen 45s with them. Ska records like "Strictly For You" by Roland. The latin track, "Savuit" by Tommy McCook. Jazz albums like "I Cover the Waterfront" by Roland and serious reggae like Tommy & the Supersonics record, "Top Secret."
So by the time I was playing in Donkey Show (1986-1990), I was really into Roland and Tommy. So when DS was contacted about recording with Roland and playing a gig backing him up I was ecstatic. We had to learn 5 songs to play with him. I remember one was christine keilor.
When we met the man. He was so sweet and nice. He seemed to just speak in sayings. Everything he said had a musical lilt to it.
He was paralyzed from a stroke. But he also told us a story how he had been poisoned by some guy who wanted his land and that he woke up in the morgue.
He showed us how God helped him play. He showed us how he could barely move one of his hands but he could still get around the horn.
But man. I was so excited. We talked about John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet.
At the gig, I tried so hard to sound like him. When he was on stage and he liked what you played he would make these squeals of pleasure. Everytime he did that I felt like a million bucks.
He had this velvety sound. So beautiful you wouldnt want the saxophone to be played any other way. Deep and rich.
I have this cassette at home that has written on it, “King of Sax”, it’s a tape of this old Roland album. A friend of mine was in the studio one warehouse and found an old test pressing that Coxsonne gave to him and he made me a tape of it. (I think they re-released this on cd in the early 90s). This cassette became my muse and I began practicing along with it.
About a year after this, I heard the Skatalites as a band for the first time. It was a lineup with Roland/Tommy and the 2 Lloyds. I had been listening to the live cassette on Roir, “Stretching Out” a lot. So I was really pumped to see them and they didn’t disappoint.
I basically stood right between Roland and Tommy at the front of the stage and I ate it up.
About two years after this, Hepcat got to open for the Skatalites on a 2 week California tour. That was a workshop. Playing the heads to standards with Roland. Tommy let me play his saxophone and wrote down exercises for me to practice. I was in heaven.
I think Tommy liked me cause I brought him a Tommy McCook album to sign. He hated it when people would bring him the Roland Alphonso “Strictly For You” album to sign.
We also had some temperament issues in common. We both just got along really well.
After that, I would see them when the Skatalites came around and would say hi. Would just dig the beautiful sounds.
The last time I saw Tommy was in Princeton or New Brunswick. One of those Jersey college towns. I was playing in the Stubborn All Stars He seemed old and tired. I sat with him in the back room as he set up his sax. I remember him saying to me, “They say that Coltrane practiced every day” and we mused on that thought for a while.
I wrote Cooking For Tommy for him when I heard he was sick but I never got to play it for him. It was a get well card. He called me from Atlanta to tell me tha t Hellcat had sent him an empty cd case. He died soon after. So he never heard it.
The last time I saw Roland was at a Slackers show I think. Around 1997 or 1998. We had hired him to sit in with us at a show in Wetlands. Me and my friend, Pascuale, went to Queens to pick him up at his house. We drove into manhattan rocking out to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Me and him would just say one word phrases to each other commenting on the music like….”Modal” or “Twelve Bar Blues” and crack up.
I went to Roland’s memorial service in Crown Heights. It was quite a scene. Lots of born again preachers. Old school Jamaicans talking about the old days. Not much was mentioned about his post 1970s career. I remember Ken Stewart wishing that one of us Americans had gotten up to speak when we had the chance. So we could have talked about, “what Roland meant to us.”
I don’t know if I could have done it. I probably would have stuttered and blubbered like a baby cause he meant so much to me.
I guess meeting Roland & Tommy solidified and confirmed a lot of my ideas about mixing Jazz with Jamaican Rhythms. Maybe the rhythm section was the one with the original concept that made “ska” what it is, but these guys to me were the icing on the cake.
God I miss them.
2:36 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|