2013-05-18T10:58:43-04:00 Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=colin-grant Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Colin Grant Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3080033 2013-04-14T09:03:40-04:00 2013-04-15T14:39:49-04:00

Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colin-grant/
Blackwell also knew that he was playing with fire. Marley, Tosh and Wailer were a band of brothers. Each was a star in his own right. Each could have been the chosen one: they were first among equals. The harmonious trio had met as teenagers in the Trench town ghetto and in the fierce competitive heat of the Jamaican music industry they had forged a uniquely powerful music. They were force ripe youths, wily and much older than their years. They were proud and knew that their music was special. But they announced with their first album for Island Records, Catch a Fire, that they would in Jamaican parlance, "throw corn but they wouldn't call no fowl" - which kind of translates as take it or leave it.

They made their intentions clear in that first album that the corrosive and combustible history of Jamaica would be writ large in songs like Catch a Fire, "Slave Driver, the table is turned." Catch a Fire and Burnin' which followed were a scorching indictment of oppression but also demonstrated their indomitable spirit and lust for life.

But it was never going to last. These outsized talents would not be able to continue to work together. They were like three bullocks who had outgrown the paddock; along came Chris Blackwell and lifted the latch, and elevated Marley. When it came to it Blackwell could not do business with Wailer and Tosh. The Wailers represented three different ways of being black in the latter half of the twentieth century: Marley was accommodating - not to say that he would sell out his talents but that he would be more practical than the other two; Tosh was the most militant (and never quite left Trench town no matter how comfortable his life became); and Bunny Wailer did not want to tour - he'd rather plant his crops and feed his chickens. There you have it: three archetypes. Accommodation, rebellion and retreat.

After ten years of working together and on the brink of international success, the wheels came off on the trio of original Wailers. But in their time they produced a powerful body of work which is both a call to arms and a balm, an instrument of repair. Even if they had produced nothing else, Catch a Fire would have secured their place in the pantheon of great musicians. Forty years on the fire is still burning.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1739694 2012-08-06T19:00:00-04:00 2012-10-06T05:12:17-04:00

Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colin-grant/
Peter Tosh alluded to the notion that though Bob Marley was a generous man, his star was so bright that he had eclipsed the rest of Reggae's musicians, no matter how great. In some regard Tosh was right. At the height of Marley's fame, record producers flooded the island looking for others who fit the bill - they preferably had to be dreadlocked and spouting Rasta. Still later, with Marley's death, the hunt was on to find the new King of Reggae. It has proved an impossible task.

Fifty years on from Jamaica's independence from Britain, in Wheel and Come Again, my documentary on BBC 6 Music, I pose the question: "What has Jamaica given the world." Never mind the supremacy of its athletes, epitomised by Usain Bolt, Jamaica's greatest gift to the world is its music, especially Reggae, and its musicians who stretch back from Marley to such greats as Don Drummond and forward to Sizzla. Jamaica is a poor country and yet this small island - the loudest place on the planet - is brim full of extraordinarily creative people who fashioned a music out of nothing.

At heart Reggae is dirt music: it has emerged from the dirt and grinding poverty of the country. A simple way of charting its evolution is to look at the changing dress sense of a band like the Wailers. In the course of ten years they went from looking like prototype Rhythm and Blues harmony singers dressed in two-tones suits and Brylcreamed hair to sporting fearsome dreadlocks and battle fatigues.

The music evolved just as the country did after independence. Jamaica, the pearl of the Antilles and the most beautiful places in the world, was born in bloodshed. Its music has long reflected and transcended the violence of its slave past. For four centuries its fortunes were yoked to the so-called motherland. The African ancestry of the majority of its population was barely mentioned. It was taboo. The national newspaper, The Gleaner, had long trumpeted the attractions of silence and forgetting. Its stance was unequivocally summed up with the editorial dictum: "Questions of colour will not feature on our pages."

After independence, Jamaica tried to forge an identity of its own. Previously, Jamaica had looked to England, for validation in all aspects of life. The island and its people went through a crisis of identity with independence. Into that vacuum, Marcus Garvey emerged. In 1964, his remains were brought back from England where he had died ignominiously in 1940; and Garvey, who had once been such a divisive figure, now became a unifying one. Garvey was paid tribute to in song by my many Reggae stars, most notably Burning Spear, primarily because he had played the role of John the Baptist to Haile Selassie's Jesus Christ. Garvey was venerated as was Selassie. And ultimately, a cultural coup that took place in Jamaica with the ascendancy of Rastafari.

In the 1950s and early 60s the Rastas were outcasts, dirty barefoot, rank-smelling pariahs that no respectable person would have anything to do with. Yet in the course of twenty years they came, internationally, to define Jamaican culture.The music also reflected the political temperature of the times. Niney the Observer's Blood and Fire , for example, was born out of the near civil war that Jamaica descended into in the mid1970s, largely as a result of the sharp divisions of patronage politics, often described as: "When your party is in you eat; when the other man's party is in you starve."

Jamaican music has always illuminated the darkness. In 1978, the "One Love Peace" concert showed how music could also be redemptive and acts as an instrument of healing. For Reggae lovers the golden period passed with the rise of Dancehall and the punany lyricists whose accent was on sex and violence: slackness.

Nothing more brutally showed that there had been another cultural coup in Jamaica in the late 80s and 90s than the sting festival of 1990, when the crowd expecting a lyrical clash between Ninja Man and Shabba Ranks, turned their displeasure on Bunny wailer who had begun his set with old school conscious lyric -writing Reggae. Bunny Wailer was bottled off the stage.
For decades many have waited for the singers to come back and reclaim the music. But, in truth, the singers never really went away. Extraordinarily, at festivals like Glastonbury, the stars most associated with the golden period of Reggae (groups like Toots and the Maytals) have found a new young audience eager for their timeless sound.

The most important facet of Jamaican music is that it re-introduced the world to the sufferer - the poor downtrodden masses who bear their daily defeats with dignity. Even in the midst of their travails it lifts the people with the notion that better must come. But whether it speaks of the here-today or the here-after, at some level, Jamaican music speaks to us all.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1584576 2012-06-10T11:33:04-04:00 2012-08-10T05:12:07-04:00

Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colin-grant/
The truce engineered by the ghettos' political enforcers, the gunmen who were architects of the One Love Peace Concert, was short-lived. Three decades later it led to Christopher "Dudus" Coke, an enforcer beyond the control of his political paymasters, whose attempts to rein him in resulted in mayhem, until his capture at a police checkpoint, dressed as a woman in an ill-fitting pink wig.

Up until then, Dudus, made rich through drug dealing and gun racketeering, could confidently rely on his local supporters in Kingston's Tivoli Gardens ghetto - old ladies who sported T-shirts bearing the inscription "I will die for Dudus" - not to give him up: their disapproval of the violence perpetrated by his posse was offset by the credit lines on offer from him; the small hand-outs when they needed money to buy school uniforms or to pay the utility bills long in arrears.

Coke is something of a throwback to the 1970s. Horace Levy, a sociologist at the University of the West Indies , says: "What has changed is that the level of violence has escalated." Jamaica with a population of fewer than three million has one of the highest murder rates in the world. "The dons in the 1970s were often in their late 40s," says Levy. "They might even have had a Rasta or Socialist sensibility. They would keep a lid on things. Claudius Massop, a Tivoli Gardens enforcer, was an architect of the One Love Peace Concert."

Since the 70s the number of dons has multiplied just as their fiefdoms have shrunk. The new teenaged dons show allegiance to no one and pay scant attention to the conscious lyrics of old school Reggae.

Jamaicans describe that someone is "under manners" when he has been censured for a transgression and penalised. As he starts his prison sentence in the USA , Christopher Coke has clearly been placed under very heavy manners. During his manhunt, heavy manners were also imposed on his stronghold at Tivoli Gardens, and order was restored.

But of equal concern to Jamaicans is what comes after the judicial process. In recent years this small island has had less to fear from the extradition of suspects than from those violent criminals convicted in American or British courts who, after their time is served, have been deported back home to begin a new reign of terror.

There is a profound need for truth and reconciliation. More than seventy people perished in the hunt for Dudus in tactics which some claim owe more to counter-insurgency than everyday policing. Relations between the Jamaican Constabulary Force and sizeable portions of the population they police were already fractured; the distrust has deepened. Trust needs to be restored. Jamaica would benefit from a return of Bob Marley and the spirit of One Love; and from the unity offered by Usain Bolt.

Before we turn comfortably in our beds with the thought that this is a local, Jamaican problem, let us remind ourselves that for years Coke was in the import/export business - not just of guns and drugs but also of personnel. In the last decade a criminal diaspora has washed up on shores of the UK , USA and Canada . Behind the hysterical headlines in British newspapers in the late 1990s about the rise of vicious Jamaican "Yardies", was the real anxiety that they had ushered in a new culture and a new kind of nihilistic criminal. British police commanders have been loath to report the change: whereas a few years' back feckless youthful felons would have run away from pursuing policemen; now they're just as likely to stand and turn their guns on them. What happens in Jamaica doesn't stay there.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1263979 2012-04-20T00:15:12-04:00 2012-04-20T08:02:19-04:00

Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colin-grant/
Marley is not only an icon but also a shorthand for 'cool' and 'spirituality'. From amateur postings on YouTube to the soundtrack of Hollywood blockbusters such as I Robot, Bob Marley is as captivating as he was electrifying on stage more than 30 years ago. How then to capture the potency and essence of this man whose image and sound is so ubiquitous? Well, first give the job to Martin Scorsese, pass the task on to Jonathan Demme, before settling on Kevin Macdonald, that's how.

As seen at the world premeiere of Marley at the Berlin Film Festival last night, Bob Marley has found a champion in the innovative filmmaker Macdonald - who says that he hopes he has made the "definitive documentary" - to chart his extraordinary and thrilling life. Macdonald announces his boldness early on. We are introduced to the dungeons of Elmina, the slave castle in Ghana, guided to the gate through which the enslaved would pass bound for the New World, never to see Africa again.

But through that dark passage, the film opens to a sharp, throbbing surge of humanity, which is the ghetto of Trenchtown in Jamaica. The connection with the pity of history and the remembrance of the slave past in the Wailers' songs Slave Driver and 400 Years is made immediately.

Macdonald has a keen sense of the contradictions found in Jamaica, Marley's birthplace. The camera's eagle eye sweeps down over the island, offering an image almost of pre-history, and verdant beauty. But, it descends finally to the pestilent squalor of Trenchtown - home to Marley, and his wailing Wailers compadres, Peter Tosh and Livingston, for much of their youth. Indeed, Macdonald has assembled a fine cast of witnesses to Marley's story - none more so than the mischievous and mystical Bunny Wailer (formerly Livingston).

Livingston spells out clearly that Marley, whose mother was black, and whose father was white, was an enigma in a ghetto that was overwhelmingly populated by black people. In Jamaica, a caste system prevailed: white people and the fairskinned elite were despised for the sins of the slave past, and for the way that colonial society was engineered for their benefit. Marley's complexion meant that he was viewed suspiciously. After all, this was a time when Rastafarian ceremonies would begin with the chant: "Death to the white man and his black allies!"

Rita Marley explains that Marley essentially over-compensated for his fair skin by becoming socially and politically, blacker than black. That embrace of his blackness was also a consequence of the rejection he suffered. Marley was abandoned by his father, Norval, at birth. As an adolescent he sought out and attempted to forge a connection with the wealthy side of the Marley family, only to be spurned.

One of the more poignant and inspired moments in the film comes when Macdonald lends a set of earphones and iPod to those relatives to hear the song, Cornerstone, that Marley wrote, based on the traumatic incident. The relatives are fast to pick up on the biblical truth of the song: that the cornerstone (Marley) is the stone that the builder (his wealthy relatives) reject. Ironically, Marley is now an icon; nobody knows those relatives (save for film makers and biographers who occasionally come calling).

One of the challenges in making a documentary of Bob Marley's life is finding reliable witnesses. Indeed, Jamaica is a country where it is famously said: "there are no facts, only versions". And Macdonald's film occasionally struggles to free itself from being held hostage to some dubious "versions". At times, viewers might feel, as I did, that some of the protagonists, such as Lee "Scratch" Perry, might have been saved from parodying themselves.

Nonetheless, the documentary Marley is a startlingly original film. Macdonald has teased out some poignant and intelligent remembrances, especially from the likes of Cindy Breakspeare, one of Marley's long-term girlfriends, and mother to one of his children. And for the first time there seems to be - on film at least - a rapprochement between adversaries and competing voices for the legacy of Bob Marley.

After the agony of the false starts, and the trials and tribulations of the earlier directors on this project, Kevin Macdonald provides us with the ecstasy of Marley. Through the extraordinary music, the colour, story-telling and imagery you will emerge from the cinema transformed.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.888579 2011-07-01T10:21:28-04:00 2011-08-31T05:12:01-04:00

Colin Grant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colin-grant/
At a time in the 20th century when Negroes believed themselves despised, the flamboyant ebony orator, Marcus Garvey, galvanised millions with his titanic belief in race pride. Yet the name 'Garvey' elicits both adoration and disgust amongst black people. It might have something to do with his hat.

To admirers the Victorian military uniform, complete with plumed bicornate helmet was in keeping with the regal countenance of the man proclaimed provisional president of Africa . "Absurd," shout his detractors. For them Garvey is a tragic character straight out of pantomime, whose mimetic craving for equality only served to perpetuate the dominant view of the black man's evolutionary inferiority.

For the first reading of the book there could be no more perfect venue than the Marcus Garvey Library in Haringey. Or so I thought; the Ligali Front (a collection of Afrikan activists) thought otherwise. As reported on its forum, not only had the biographer announced his coconut credentials with the title of the book, Negro with a Hat, but he also worked for the BBC, which the informed brethren knew was short-hand for the Bombaclaat Broadcasting Corporation.

The faithful, custodians of Marcus Garvey's legacy, were alerted to assemble urgently at the library. Their temper might be judged by the blogger who wrote: "If Dem Diss Marcus Dem Must Die!"

I headed for Haringey certain only that the irony of the title had not met with the understanding I had so naively presumed. In the estimation of Ligali's Brother Olatunji, Chief Officer Politics Department, it was akin to calling a book on Jinnah "Paki in a Suit." Perhaps a sympathetic audience was not guaranteed.

Just inside the atrium of the library, a dull-faced punter, vacillating over whether to borrow the new biography, seemed to brighten as I walked in. His eyes flicked between me and the author's photo on the flap of the jacket.

'Oh, is you,' he burped through Guinness breath. 'You brave! Never expect you would-a come.'

My visible unease over his warning caused him no displeasure.

'Are you coming to my talk?' I asked, more feebly than intended.

He straightened his trilby. 'Oh, yes!'

His enthusiasm was worrying, but the first signs, as the crowd assembled, appeared promising. A neatly turned-out man, wearing a suit was the first to take a front-row seat. His clean finger nails and starched shirt (a dead ringer for Sidney Poitier in "Guess Who's Coming for Dinner"), immediately marked him down as an ally. I'd also taken the precaution of bringing my mentor, Viv Adams, as a point man, briefed to call out "tell 'em brother" whenever a particularly winning insight on Garvey hit the mark. For much of the night, even before clearing his throat, Viv was drowned out by the unrelenting litany of nay-sayers. They were particularly vexed by The Telegraph reviewer's conclusion that Garvey was a "black David Brent", a "chubby little loser" - sentiments they obviously believed to have been sanctioned by me. Sister Nzingha had helpfully photocopied the article and proceeded to hand out. If the book was a slug; here was the slime.

Time to play my trump card. Shouting above the din, I called upon Sidney Poitier to enlighten us all with his reflections on the book. He started piously mumbling something about top shelves, naked women and pornography; He knew what to expect from titles such as Mayfair and Men Only; the same was true of Negro with a Hat. Sidney 's assessment prompted a chorus of "Yes man, respect. Respect!" The squall of indignant voices was beginning to extinguish all hope of clarity. Someone helpfully suggested we needed a moderator. No sooner had I agreed than Sister Nzingha started to drag her chair towards the stage. A knot of excitement was finally freed in her unfurling dreadlocks. 'Right,' she bellowed, 'we'll have a question from Brother Gumba then Sister Serene. You can follow Brother Zion. I'll come to you in a minute Sister Kay...'

'Hold on, wait a second,' I interrupted, 'what about, erhh someone else we haven't already heard from?' But the unaffiliated others seemed suddenly disinclined to raise their hands. 'The problem is Colin,' suggested Ken, the most coherent critic, 'you're coming across as arrogant.' He imagined that writing about Garvey was for me 'a kind of intellectual exercise.' 'These people,' he went on to say, 'are living Garvey.'

Ken suggested that I give away a couple of copies. After all no one had read the biography; it was impossible to gauge my motives. The talk came to an end. I sat at a tiny desk with my writer's autograph pen ready. The crowd stormed to the front. The first review copy was claimed, tucked under the armpit of Sister Nzingha; the next copy similarly disappeared, and then one more, then a couple of others, until finally none remained.

'Have you sold out?' A straggler asked as we started to clear away. 'Apparently,' I replied.





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