How’s Your Music Diet?

When it comes to music I’m a purist. Music is the food of love. Organic is best.

Growing up surrounded by the likes of Errol Garner, Count Basie, Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes I was always going to be picky. Comparing the music I was immersed in as a child, baptised in, to what the mainstream corporates feed us today is like comparing a frozen fish-finger to a live barracuda in the ocean. As a youth it was like growing up fed by Michelin star chefs only to discover almost everyone else out there subsists on hot-dogs.

The reason is simple: The music business is run by gangster corporates. Enduring qualities of integrity and honesty are antithetical to the nihilistic ethic of corporatism. Corporate devils must be devils, they can only cheat and lie and destroy. They have no humanity to share with the world, they can only share what they are, lost and full of fakery. The corporate business model of infinite growth in a finite system reveals their fundamental nihilism and insanity. The so-called music they produce is nothing but ear candy, confectionary baubles.

Raised outside the corporate matrix I find it hard to understand why everyone doesn’t dig jazz of some flavour or another instead, be it straight jazz, blues, RnB, reggae, hip-hop or soul. It’s a big family, and easy to find out there. Many do. But most aren’t looking, happy instead to be spoon-fed by the radio. And what they’re getting is a laced diet that adds to the stupefying toxic fug of confusion, alienation, denial and pretence: the prevalent mental illness of the West.

It was Art Blakey who first warned me about the money side, how jazz doesn’t pay the big amounts some genres do, and why. But the way he described the music coming straight from The Creator, passing through his body and flowing out to the listeners, I could see that it made him rich in other ways.

That was when I learned there is something sacred or divine about the Jazz family: reggae, blues, Latin, soul, and so on: Something that connects us to a higher level of experience, a level where we experience a higher level of meaning: The divine language of the music of life, the sounds of all creation and the rhythms of its constant unfolding. That’s why it hooks in to our minds so naturally and makes a kind of sense without needing words.

This understanding informs my whole approach to composition and recording. For me, composition is just a matter of dipping your hand into that constant stream, like a Neptune rain-stream: diamonds all the way, and choosing a sparkle or two to paint with. It’s that easy. We’re all composing with every breath and stride, if we but knew it, conduits for the great symphony of the cosmos. I compose on different instruments. “Easy Glider’ was composed on the vibraphone, for instance, while ‘Jinja Hills’ came through on the Melodica.

For me, recording starts with mindful preparation for total emptying of the mind in the meditation of playing. Sacraments may be employed, incense, a gong struck to focus the mind, and so on. From that state of inner calm I launch into playing. I do not think, thinking gets in my way; I do not try, but rest on the waters not resisting their flow; I enable the instrument to play what and how it wants to. Of course I do have some say in it, haha, but I never know what will come out and there is always an element of total surprise at the unexpected.

Some tunes are done in single take or two, others can take hours, days even, to get right. No matter how rehearsed I am the mood and the moment have to align just so; when you catch the vibe just right you can hear it.

Everyone does their thing a little way different. The rest of the band all have their own personal approaches to getting inside the music, but we all share a sense of the sacredness about its source and about the process of channelling it. A sense of gratitude too, for the Ancestors who have passed it on before.

We’ve all learned a lot and grown musically and recording-wise along the way. The development of our blend of genres like reggae, blues and jazz can be seen from the first tune we recorded, ‘Blue Maroon’, to the last (so far), ‘Afro Blue’.

A lot of people find pure jazz too overwhelming, so many notes, it can sound like so much noise. It can feel like too much information, something you have to analyse with a textbook in your hand. I know. We all know jazz is supposed to be ‘Black people’s classical music’, our top quality stuff, so why’s it so boring? Simple: Because it’s mostly footnotes and re-runs of the old-time greats. Our sound is nothing like that.

It’s hard to find a new sound, one that is totally true to the self and to the age. I think we have achieved it though. A lot of the tracks on this album focus on playing blues and jazz phrases on the vibraphone in a reggae context, slowed right down and stretched out wide so listeners can really get in the groove of what the instruments are saying. The lead guitar speaks the same language. Piano and organ add more depth to the jazz end and colour up the reggae rhythm section; bass and drums are the engine, with melodica, a horn with chords, for extra colour and mood.

No fast-food for your ears here, mate. All freshly prepared organic ingredients. If you like Jackie Mittoo, Ernest Ranglin, Lennie Hibbert, the rich mellow jazzy side of the old-school studio 1 vibe, you will enjoy the album for sure. Spicy, hot, sweet and juicy. Don’t take my word for it, have a listen. Enjoy!

For more on all topics to do with Abracadia and its work, don’t forget to check Abracadia’s weekly spoken word offering at the ‘Bit Of Soul Podcast’. Come and say hi, pass by for a try. Be great to see you there. Just roll up anytime to listen, chill and reason at the lush and refreshing oasis that is Abracadia.

Until such time - In Ubuntu

Remi

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