Anti-war deadliness — stripped, direct, heartfelt, with a murderous dub, mixed by Phillip Smart at King Tubbys.
Jennifer Hylton’s early-nineties r’n'b-tipped torpedo, recorded by Lloyd Pickout Dennis at Dynamic, with the Firehouse Crew.
Surely this is a Lloyd Campbell production of The Revolutionaries, not a Niney.
Either way it’s total murder, with a dub originally entitled The Rise And Fall Of The South African Regime.
Next cut to The Heptones’ almighty We Want It.
Stone cold murder. Archetypal, slow-mo, eastern-sounds post-ska from Jackie Mittoo, Dizzy Moore, Roland Alphonso and co, around 1965.
Lloyd Forest, Tommy Thomas and Samuel Bramwell at Joe Gibbs.
Cedric was a jazz nut. Enrolled at Alpha Boys aged eight, he was soon revelling in Ruben Delgado’s new jazz course. He flourished under Lennie Hibbert’s directorship, before setting out in the early sixties with Sonny Bradshaw’s big band, followed by a residency with Leslie Butler and Hedley Jones playing jazz at Club 35 in Montego Bay; then stints with the bands of Granville Williams, Cecil Lloyd and Teddy Greaves. “Kind of easy listening jazz, mixed with some of the regular pop stuff, for dancing.”
Amazingly, by the end of the decade Cedric was living in Philadelphia, on the verge of moving in with the Arkestra. He jammed up in the hills with Count Ossie, at Rockfort; and towards the end of his life, he jammed on the New York subway. Sonny Rollins was his main man. Have another listen to him on Door Peep Shall Not Enter.
It’s all magnificently expressed in these two highlights of the Africa Calling LP, recorded at Treasure Isle with Errol Brown for producer Sonia Pottinger in 1977.
Expertly explosive brass arrangements and brilliant soloing, electric keys and wah wah guitar gently counterposed to nyabinghi group-drumming; with uncontrived spirituality, nothing easy or halfway-house.
Bim.