I am extremely concerned that two of the key witnesses who should have shown up at the Manatt Commission of Enquiry were not subpoenaed in time for their appearance on the very first day.

I would have even gone beyond the issuing of a subpoena. Were I secretary or counsel for the Commission I would have, with consummate ease, placed the stressful state of the nation in the forefront of my mind and in an effort to alleviate it I would have gleefully exceeded the powers of any commission of enquiry by sending out arrest warrants for Ity and Fancy Cat, Jamaica’s ace comedy duo.

In giving evidence Ity would have probably begun by saying, ‘Your Honour, er, Mas Commissioner, in hanser to di question from di learnded man hova dere so dress up inna jacket an tie like im expect winter fi drop a Conference Centre, I would like to plead di fifth.’

Fancy Cat: (under his breath) ‘Ity mi bredrin, dis a nuh ‘Merica. Nuh fifth nuh dey yah! Wi nuh reach dey so yet! Yu haffi plead di fourth!’

Ity: ‘Hey Fancy, yu know how much time me haffi try an beg yu fi learn how fi talk in dese hexplendent halls of justice. Yu use too much a di dey. Mi a tell yu again, nuh dey nuh di dey!’

Last Thursday, attorney-at-law representing the PNP, KD Knight, not a man to mince words, captured my sentiments exactly when he used the word ‘untidy’ to describe the proceedings being led by lawyer Emil George, QC, a man who seems to have left his best professional years way, way behind him.

Frankly, the KD Knight Jamaica knows probably had a much more descriptive, international word, with a twist, in his mind but, I suppose, once bitten, a man tends to be twice shy. In plain language Mr Emil George, the chairman of the commission, seems as if being commissioned to lead the Commission of Enquiry has been too much for him. In plainer language, at times, faced with the eminent team of lawyers, he seems out of his depth.

On the week before the last, Hugh Small and KD Knight were literally trying their best to tell Mr George how to marshal the commission without actually saying to him, ‘Please, Sir, can you not get it right?’

Apart from the extremely poor TV reception (technically) from JNN and PBCJ, for me who is no lawyer, it has been an absolute joy to watch and listen to a battery of Jamaica’s top advocates in KD Knight, Winston Spaulding, Patrick Atkinson, Patrick Bailey and the man who seems to bring pause whenever he speaks, Justice Hugh Small.

We are told that of the $40 million budgeted for the enquiry, $30 million is earmarked for the commissioners. Mr George whispers to the other two commissioners and they never speak, so, as they make no audible input at the enquiry, we cannot judge them. The same cannot be said of Emil George. If, however, the chairman’s somewhat muddled directions and general input are indicative of where the Commission of Enquiry is headed, we may as well now commit the $40 million as another huge waste of public funds.

Early last week when attorney-at-law Harold Brady took the stand and the expected inputs from Small, Atkinson and Bailey were made, on Brady saying he would not answer a single question, it seems like nitpicking but Mr George even forgot to say to Brady, ‘Mr Brady, you may go.’ Someone else had to ask the chairman if Brady could leave, that is, without being considered uncivil.

An Englishman would probably say, “Bloody waste of time,” and I would agree with him 100 per cent. KD Knight again captured how I felt about the commission when he stated that in watching it on television, on the day he was absent, it made him cringe.

Meanwhile, on a ‘corners’ two men are talking with each other. One has the remains of a whole roasted chicken in his hand. Chicken bones are sticking out of his nostrils. He tips the scale at just under 1,000 pounds. The other one is on the lean, hungry side, nibbling on the end of a chicken wing.

Ity: ‘Fancy Cat, mi nuh care whey nuh guy sey. Mi a go a di Commission go give hevidence.’

Fancy Cat: ‘Den a wey hevidence yu a go gi? Yu did mix up wid Dudus and the man dem hat an clothes an money? Nobody nuh sen fi yu.’

Ity: ‘Dat nuh matter. Me an you haffi go whey joke a gi wey an it a gi wey dung a di Commission of Enquiry. If a hegg, Ity and Fancy Cat haffi inna di red. Blam blam!’

The history of the Jamaican sound system

IN the most ‘dangerous’ years of my life (in the 1970s) two friends and I operated a sound system named Eternity, known then and now as a ‘disco’, short for discotheque.

In that triad, I was the techie, designing and constructing the speaker enclosures (boxes) and even winding the 5MH coils that were used in the circuit of the crossover units.

During those times there was always one man who could be called on to give advice to youngsters who needed sound information (pun intended) on audio- amplifiers and speaker boxes. He was Horace Leslie Galbraith of Galbraith’s Electronics which operated from 1970 to 1994. This February 12, he becomes 85 years of age.

A year ago, he sent me a document he wrote on the history of the Jamaican sound system, giving the timeline on how it all came about. It was also sent to Basil Walters of the Observer. Walters wrote an article which highlighted important parts of Galbraith’s story.

To me, it is pure, living history, especially in a Jamaica that has been so long caught up in its musical side and it had to be captured in its entirety. Galbraith was not only there, he was an integral part of its beginning.

In 1952, Leslie Galbraith built the first television set in Jamaica. He was one of the first people to acquire (before the days of the small electronic keyboards) an electric organ. When these became popular in the churches (they replicated the sound of the huge pipe organs), for several years he was the only person in Jamaica who knew how to fix them and so he ended up visiting churches all over the island as he willingly and single-handedly maintained all the church organs.

It was Leslie Galbraith who set up the Duke Reid Studio in the 1960s and he also assisted with Randy’s Studio in ‘troubleshooting’ areas, as he termed it.

This is the first of eight parts of Horace Leslie Galbraith’s History of the Jamaican Sound System.

Part 1

‘Radio came to Jamaica in the early to mid-1930s. In those years, all radios sold in Jamaica had to be able to tune in to the short wave (SW) radio bands as the broadcasts from England, (the BBC), the Netherlands, Germany and France were all short wave transmissions. Medium wave (MW) radios could also pick up Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as the high-powered American stations WCKY, WLWO and WLNY, but only from after dark until sunrise, (when atmospheric conditions allowed for reception).

‘In the early years there were not many radios and I remember in 1936, when King Edward VIII was crowned, Jamaicans gathered in the streets outside of the houses of those who owned radios. These radios were then turned up to the maximum for the people outside to hear the broadcast.

‘My father, a wharf man, as, years later, I would be simply ‘a radio man’, saved for two or three years until he could eventually buy a second-hand radio. This was 1937 and this was the first time I had seen a radio up close. I pulled that radio apart and put it together so many times that sometimes it just refused to work. Whenever this happened, my father — not knowing that I had ‘worked’ on the radio (or else I would have been skinned alive!) — would open it up and check every connection until it started working.

‘In those days, as now, when you were from a poor family you had to be very enterprising. I used to make kites and gigs (tops) and other small wooden toys which I sold. My father had a big, copper soldering iron that he had made and which was heated on a coal fire. I used this to solder handles onto condensed milk cans and turned them into mugs which were sold through a middle man to the market people. In this way, as a schoolboy, I earned some money. With these funds, I started buying Popular Mechanics magazines from Times Store.

‘The late Sonny Bradshaw and Edward Wong and I and some other fellows who went to Central Branch School all moved together, all the time fooling around with old radios. At one of our friend’s yards, his father, a Mr Dunlop, who used to fix speakers, had a treasure trove of discarded radios under his house. From Popular Mechanics I learnt how to salvage parts from old radios to make ‘new’ radios. But, in fact, it was the great musicman Sonny Bradshaw who got the first radio that I built to actually work.

‘Shortly after WWII started in 1939, broadcasting was suspended for all amateur (HAM) radio operators. These HAM radio operators, although dubbed ‘amateurs’, were highly qualified men who built their own transmitters and communicated with each other and with other HAM operators worldwide. They were licensed to transmit and about 15 to 20 transmitted in Jamaica. They transmitted in Morse code. In times of disaster, like hurricanes, they were the only means of communication Jamaica had with the outside world.

‘With the advent of war, these operators were forbidden to transmit by order of the Government, and so Mr John Grinan, a HAM Radio operator, donated his transmitting apparatus to the Jamaican Government. With the expertise of the amateur fraternity and others, they transformed the apparatus into a broadcasting station with a small studio on Fairway Avenue. The first Jamaican radio station, Radio ZQI, (later to become RJR) started broadcasting on 3.75 MHZ and 4.95MHZ with Archie Lindo, Dennis Gick and others.

‘It was remarkable how significantly things changed with the advent of ZQI. Before ZQI started broadcasting, all children and many adults were in their beds at 7.00 pm. After local broadcasting with ZQI began, all persons with radios listened to the local station until 8.00 pm — when it signed off — and then retired to bed. ZQI eventually extended their hours from 6.00 am to 9.00 pm and then to 10.00 pm.’

In part 2 next week, World War II is on, and after leaving Central Branch and attending Kingston Technical High School, 18-year-old Galbraith enlists and goes overseas to war. It is 1944.

‘Eating a food’ and breaking the law

A man breaks the law of the land by stealing a few dozen ackees from another person’s property. He is caught, charged, convicted and sent to prison. I have no problem with that.

Another high-powered man, elected to high office in this land of ours, uses his position to expropriate the resources of the nation to the tune of tens of millions, is caught and charged, but uses a battery of high-powered lawyers to lead the nation through a song and dance routine. Usual chance of him being found guilty and sent to prison? Don’t waste time considering the odds. The game is set according to what we see as ‘class’, business and political connections. The nation ought to be concerned about that.

The music industry is not for the weak. There are not only pirates in the recording studios ripping off the hapless performers, but outside the studios the little man illegally hawking music CDs and DVDs — after having them burned through the use of a computer — is just as guilty as some sly Japanese producer ripping off reggae and dancehall artistes by illegally printing many thousands of CDs of Jamaican music and selling them without those initially involved seeing a cent of the returns.

Mr Hedley Jones, president of the Jamaica Federation of Musicians (JFM) from 1985 to 1995, will be 94 years of age this year, making him Jamaica’s oldest newspaper columnist. He writes for the Western Mirror. He, a Jamaican, built the world’s first solid-body electric guitar in 1940, seven years before the American Les Paul made his and patented it.

He and Leslie Galbraith were contemporaries in the technical development of audio and music in Jamaica. In an article he wrote recently for the Western Mirror, he had some important words for those Jamaicans who insist on failing to appreciate their music copyright transgressions. Much of what he wrote is ‘news’ to me.

‘The more serious of copyright breaches are covered by the Rome Convention under the heading of Performing Rights. They cover: 1) Bootlegging; which refers to outright theft of musical material for sale by reproduction on tape or CDs. Unfortunately that practice is openly done in a number of record shops all over the country and sold on the street corners of every nook and cranny of most villages of Jamaica, under the guise that the perpetrators are striving to “eat a food”.

‘(2) Plagiarism: Any copy of an author’s work bearing the signature of any unauthorised individual is a plagiarised work punishable by law.

‘(3) Derogatory treatment: In its simplest form the removal of the original lyrics of a musical work and replacement by other words is a horrible breach of copyright for the rightful owner of the original work.

‘(4) Mutilation: A musical work is said to be mutilated where the intent of the original author is violated; such breaches occur (as a case in point) when in the late 1980s the song Lonely Won’t Leave Me Alone was recorded in Jamaica by tone-deaf individuals in Reggae format, using two chords in a score that needs at least nine or more chord changes to carry out the author’s intent. And dear reader, that derogatory recording is often played with announcer glee by our mostly tone-deaf disc jockeys on local radio. (I am aware that I rustle the feathers of some music commentators here; but I invite anyone to say it loud and clear).

‘(5) False Accreditation: The substitution of the name of an original author. This breach is common to Jamaican sound system operators.

‘(6) Last but by no means least is the 4-bar rule: A music writer is allowed to write four identical bars of an original copy, but should the fifth bar begin with a note identical to the original, that’s an infringement to be discarded. How many of our myriad music judges are capable of making such a discovery?’

When Hedley Jones was head of the JFM he fought both JLP and PNP administrations ‘tooth and nail’, as he termed it, to put in place relevant copyright legislation to replace the then archaic British law on copyright of 1911.

Jones is of the view that many in radio and in advertising, especially the younger ones, operate without the requisite knowledge of the strictures covered in the copyright laws.

He asks the following questions, ‘How many of our party goers are aware that a private party with more than 25 persons in attendance, where music is used for entertainment, is in law a public performance that needs the assent of a public authority? How much of the public is aware that music played on a public passenger vehicle is in breach of copyright?’

According to Jones, ‘The only PPV carriers exempt from infringement of copyright are coaches for hire, ships at sea or aeroplanes. Private cars are also exempt.’

I thank the grand old man of music development in Jamaica, Mr Hedley Jones, for this most valuable input.

Enquiry into Tivoli killings needed?

MY friend Lloyd D’Aguilar of the Campaign for Social and Economic Justice, the public defender Earl Witter and many other concerned Jamaicans have been calling for a Commission of Enquiry into what many have called, ‘The Tivoli Massacre.’

Following the 2001 killing of 27 Jamaicans in the stand-off between Tivoli gunmen and the security forces, a Commission of Enquiry was held. The Commission chairman was Justice Julius Isaacs, a man then taken up with sleeping.

For those who came in late, the man fell asleep at the chair and actually began snoring. Absolutely no joke!

We were left no wiser as to what actually took place.

This time around, the security forces entered Tivoli Gardens and the death toll has been listed as anywhere between 73 and 200. In this Tivoli has been its own worst enemy, in that, in past encounters with the security forces, Tivoli has been made out to be the hapless victim while the security forces have been painted as a killing machine, serving only to protect political interests. The truth is in there somewhere, but getting at it is no easy process.

Whether the residents of Tivoli, en masse, have always been readily disposed to giving the politically correct side of THEIR story, to me that is immaterial. Any country that kills over 70 of its own outside of a fully blown civil war and can simply declare that it is time we move on is a mortally sick state.

But — and this is an important but — what have previous enquiries achieved in advancing our knowledge of what transpired and, more importantly, guided us in bringing to book those responsible?

Absolutely nothing! So, therein lies a most troubling dilemma. We need the enquiry, but even before it is called we can catch the smell of the cover-up. On both sides!

observemark@gmail.com