May 25th 2012
After the final reading on Friday night, the crowd moved from the tented area of the festival where the readings take place, leaving a team of young boys in blue shirts and pants, to straighten out the rows of seats and clean away whatever debris was left by the crowd, to Jack Sprat, an area fenced off by a high bamboo fence, A high stage with several levels, a superb lighting grid and an amazingly clear sound system was the new focus for the night. At midnight, the stage show began. The courtyard of Jack Sprat was thick with bodies waiting to be impressed. Beers in hand, cups of liquor, smoke in the air, chatter, laughter, nods, while the sound system belted out feel good songs by Beres Hammond as the crowd of literary tasters, teenagers and adults from the surrounding community all decked out for a sweet nice out, pointed their bodies to the stage, waiting.
The stage show that ends the Friday nights of Calabash have varied over the years To a large extent there has always been a commitment to a combination of the old or vintage and the new. The stage has seen Ken Boothe, Leory Sibbles and the Heptones, and Chalice, while allowing for newer acts to open. The logic is simple--the Calabash audience, while varied still skewers towards people who might have come of age and learned to dance in the seventies and eighties.
Seretse Small, the preternaturally gifted Jamaican guitarist served as the MC. He has done tis kind of work before--unrushed, casual, assured, he introduces the bands with enough energy to elicit excitement, but enough cool to give the bands space to secure their own stamp of approval.
This year, we decided to try for something that stepped out of the rubric slightly. While Raging Fyah, who was the first band to perform, constitute a new and quite young contingent of artists, their brand of reggae is roots, it is doggedly seventies in style. You hear all the echoes: Marley, Tosh, Aswad, Third World, Abyssinian harmonies, Beres Hammond of 1980s vintage, and they even did a very creditable rendition of Delroy Wilson-style singing. They are a tight unit--the drummer's rolls are crisp and classic in the urgency with which the evoke the roots feel, and they are disciplined in their ability to slow down the roots tracks to the laconic tones of tradition roots--something that, to a band on stage facing an audience, can seem to slow to do the work of livening up an audience that has become used to the frenetic addictiveness of the dancehall rhythm. Their lead singer simply belts out the names of the songs they will sing, smiles in a quizzical manner, and then proceeds to sing with authority and phrasing that suggest he has listened to a lot of Marley. He is not charismatic as the later Marley, and not quite willing to seem strange, almost insane as the early Marley or big explosive hair vintage. But Marley is the standard by which to understand this guitar wielding reggae lead singer. The band has a couple of very popular songs, which the audience recognized and applauded. By the time they left the stage, I was convinced that they will have a great European tour upon which they are about to embark.
No Maddz is a curious entity for Jamaica--an experimental, highly indefinable band, who you grow to like, and then spend the rest of the evening wondering why you like. Part of it, of course, is that they arrive on stage with a certain kind of authority and confidence. There are stools on stage, which they never use. They are, to a man, skinny, lanky fellows--one in full black, dark glasses and a face crowded with locks and a beard; the other, nattily dressed, grey jacket, tidy white shirt, and those sixties narrow ankled slacks he calls, "lion pants" when he declares to the ladies, "I bet you wish your man was hot like me...". And it goes on--distinctive, stylish dress, a post modernist sense of music that would not, however, seem strange in a Dadaist café in Florence in the thirties, a clear familiarity with the ethos and poly-rhythmic energy of dancehall, the edgy soulfulness of hip-hop vocalist, and a sense of stage (tight clusters of people doing odd things with voices, instruments and bodies) that seems perfectly designed for the Saturday Night Live sound stage of the Jimmy Fallon show. They are ironic, daring, odd, quirky, energetic, and seem like the most unlikely act to find on the Jamaican stage--but there they are, or at least, there they were on the Calabash performance stage on Friday night.