End of year pick
As I read so many 2022 best/favorite album lists, I think back to my early years in Murray Hill. I was writing for Musician magazine. There was an annual ‘unsigned band’ contest, and zillions of cassettes poured into the publication’s mailroom. I, along with several other contributing editors, volunteered to take boxes of these home and listen to them, siphoning them down to a group of ten. Then each writer’s top 10 were put into the pot and siphoned further. Musicians are dedicated. They bare their souls to the masses. They will be ‘Slave(s) To the Rhythm’ (the image of Grace Jones singing this song while walking a runway spinning a hula hoop for the duration comes to mind). These cassettes came with bios and backgrounds, many handwritten, from all over the country. The process of whittling this mountain of music down to one band was in many ways random: what if I had received a different box of tapes? You get the picture.
This experience of vetting the tapes came back to me recently as I read many critics’ end of year ‘best records’ lists. I am truly impressed by the breadth of some of them. I listen to music a lot, but often it is old music that I’m revisiting. I think of some of the live shows I saw in my twenties, long before I moved to NYC and immersed myself in the jazz scene there. (Of course, there was plenty of jazz in Philly: see my post on this site.)
Music was part of life from an early age, in part because I loved it, and in part because my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, forbid his ten children to play music in the house. My father compensated by making sure there was music in his own home, supplied by my sister and me at the piano. “Respect the talent,” he would say, admonishing guests who dared to speak while we were playing. It’s amusing to me now, but it wasn’t then. I did not enjoy my lessons with Mrs. Brall, who wore April Violets perfume and had spotted, heavily scented and creamed hands. Sometimes I would feign illness to avoid her.
I saw the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Doors, the Staple Singers, the Supremes, Frank Sinatra, The Average White Band, James Brown, Billy Paul, Willie Nelson, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, the Brecker Brothers, Bob Marley, and a host of other musicians by the time I was in my late twenties.
I was deep into reggae before I saw Bob Marley: Philly had its own hometown band, The House of Assembly. The bass player was a sous chef at a local restaurant; I worked as a manager in a French restaurant, and then as a bartender at another, and I was enamored of him. I would stop in the kitchen on my way to work and talk with him while he was prepping for dinner; he and the crew would come up after they closed and have a drink at ‘my’ bar. I had seen Toots and The Maytals and Third World in my hometown, and had attended Sunsplash in Montego Bay in July 1979, where Marley was due to perform a few days after I left. I had to be back at my job: there was no negotiating. So I saw him in Philly in November 1979 at Penn Hall. It was one of the most remarkable concerts I’ve ever attended. Most of the audience stood on their folding chairs for the duration, and the audience ranged from village elders to teenage metalheads to young children. It was the most striking cultural cross section I had witnessed at any concert in my hometown. The energy generated by Marley and his band was electric and unifying.
In the years that followed, I saw Peter Tosh (who trudged onto the stage wrapped in chains), Dennis Brown, and others. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the rhythm sections behind these singers. Carlton and Aston (‘Family Man’) Barrettt, Earl Lindo, and Tyrone Downie were amazing. I was deeply saddened by the death of bassist Robbie Shakespeare in December 2021. I loved the musical relationship he had with drummer Sly Dunbar, and listened to every interview I could find. I loved Robbie’s spirit: “Music is a gift from God… to the people,” he said once. The idea of a musician as a divine conduit rang true to me. I discovered Barrington Levy much later than I should have.
This year, I tuned into Protoje’s music bigtime. And I found my Song of the Year. Its message is clearly stated and repeated in the lyrics of the verse. The serious mood is leavened by a statement of fortitude: ‘and you know we steppin’. The bridge is magical: Protoje literally sings praise and his timbre lightens as he dances in the water, while his words exhort: “Quiet is so underrated/ Silence sacred.” The dub outro after “Sun haffi go shine…” confirms the indelible power of nature. But enough explication. Here it is: “Incient Stepping”.
Karen Bennett ©️ 2022
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