Jackie Mittoo & the Soul Brothers
The Light of Saba
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sure it can. Two recent reissues on British labels should give hope to everyone ever disappointed by Weather Report. On the evidence of these discs Jamaica in the 1960s and ’70s was a place where fusion–defined for the sake of argument as a simultaneous mastery of multiple genre forms and indifference to genre boundaries–had reached an acme. The incredible fertility of the Jamaican music scene is not exactly a secret, but a cursory familiarity with the island’s output didn’t prepare me for Last Train to Skaville. A compilation of 45s originally recorded between 1965 and 1967, featuring the top homegrown musicians of the era, it’s wildly eclectic. Rocksteady rhythms rub shoulders with Latin beats, the horn section plays an abbreviated melodic form of jazz, a cover of “From Russia With Love” is followed by a ska tune that owes a lot to the Ventures. In fact, in the fading moments of “Ska-culation” the guitarist launches into a straight-up surf-guitar riff, like a tribute or a clue.
Last Train could, as the liner notes admit, just as easily have been credited to Roland Alphonso & the Soul Brothers or simply the Soul Brothers. Alphonso, on sax, Mittoo, on keyboards, and other members of the group were ex-members of the pioneering Skatalites and served as the first house band of Kingston’s famed Studio One. The Soul Brothers formed immediately after the Skatalites broke up. They functioned as a collective; if they had a leader it was arguably producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd. Though his name’s on the cover, Mittoo’s keyboards are highlighted on just a few tracks, like “Home Made” and “Take Ten,” and his gravelly vocals appear only on “Got My Boogaloo,” which he cowrote. But thanks to previous reissues, he has more name recognition than his bandmates in the States.
Talking about form doesn’t have to mean getting stultifyingly technical–every critic’s hero Lester Bangs managed to write at length on music without knowing a lot about how to play the stuff. But it does put the focus where it belongs–on the music and the listener’s gut reaction to it. There’s still plenty of room for the larger cultural questions, but facile equations like black = authentic and white = fake have no place therein.
