On The Shoulders Of … Placing Remi D as a Musician
My musical influences are simple to say.
As the debut novel: ‘The Songtree: A Windrush Tale’ hints, I was privileged to have had close personal experience and connection with some of his big musical influences from childhood till his 30s. London Jazzers like Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and Phil Seaman, to US Jazzers like Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey. African drummers like Speedy and Rebop and Ginger Johnson. Caribbean artists like Ernest Ranglin, Rico and Bob Marley.
I even remember meeting Edwin Hawkins with his choir in rehearsal for their big hit, ‘O Happy Day’, and hanging with country style hippies like Arlo Guthrie and Donovan. Musicians wasn’t all I met, but it felt like most people around were connected with it.
The list is many pages, most with wow-y stories, but the point is I mixed with musicians of all kinds funky from childhood. From the cradle, really: Jazz, African, Reggae, Gospel, even Folk.
I watched and listened hard all those years: Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Gonsalves, Ray Nance, Sal Nistico, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Wellins, Victor Feldman, Milt Jackson, Bobby Wellins, Errol Garner, Phil Seaman, Jack Sharpe, Laurie Morgan, Dizzy Reece, Eddie Tan Tan Thornton, Buddy Rich and so on. Sometimes at Ronnie’s club, but more often at home or in hotel rooms struggling to sleep and wondering why me, haha.
I’ve got plenty of stories about all these people and many many more, all of them first hand. The ‘Windrush Tales’ of ‘The Songtree’ are fictions in a novel. The truth is only revealed in the music of ‘Treesongs’, the album. There you will hear all the influences absorbed by me from young.
Jazzers who I enjoyed most from childhood, aside from those I knew first hand, include Thelonious Monk, Oscar Brown Jr, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday.
On the the Soul side, I most enjoyed listening to : Ray Charles (who invented it), Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Allen Toussaint, War, Fatback Band (pre disco), Stevie Wonder, Aretha, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, Leroy Hutson, Erykah Badu and on.
On the Rocky side it was Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Lowell George, early Robert Palmer, early Edgar Winter, Bo Didley, John Lennon, Kenny Rankin, Lou Reed, Steely Dan, Traffic.
Reggae influences included the personal circles of my childhood, and I gravitated more towards that world than the jazz scene as a young man. As a young adult I hung out and/or and played with artists like Pablove Black, Sugar Minott, Bob Marley, Hugh Mundell, Johnny Clarke, Joseph Hill (Culture), Freddie McGregor, Mad Professor. Aside from some of those I’ve mixed with himself, my favourite reggae musicians are Jacob Miller, Yabby You, Augustus Pablo, Michael Prophet, Lennie Hibbert, Burning Spear, Wailing Souls, Dennis Brown, Mighty Diamonds and on.
On the hip-hop side, I always dug KRS 1 and Tribe Called Quest back in the day, but found the west coast acts un-hip, demeaning and degrading themselves and their communities instead of using their skills to uplift. On the payroll of the Man?
Of that unshining and pallid side I can only say this: The ones we admire aspire to higher than fire and pyre of nihilism. They are not so socially shattered by generations of trauma and despair that they play willing stars in their own spiritual snuff movies.
We are all descendants of unhealed generational traumas from mass kidnap, trafficking, enslavement, self-estrangement and menticide. Our true heroes are those who transgress and transcend the nihilist materialism of the criminals and their corporate industrial base, not deluded surrender-monkeys who model it like they idolise massa. The only culture in the world that publicly dishonours and disrepects their women folk, it appears that those who use music to glamourise the gangsta vibe think they are cool because they get to treat African heritage women as disrespectfully as massa has for the past 500 years, i.e. as live meat. And the women in that world often surrender to it too, broken with their dreams from early childhood by the grim, pale and anti-life realities behind the capitalist ‘freedom and democracy’ propaganda. What a waste of human beauty.
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