It is difficult, if not impossible to contain Reggae Month in Jamaica to just 29 days. The reggae cabinet is so full that the music, the lyrics, the rhythms, and the acts runneth over. The surplus of riches cultivated in this genre has impacted all regions of the world from across the Atlantic to the Pacific and back.

February 2020 has seen a plethora of exciting events and activities on show right across Jamaica highlighting the strength and importance of reggae. Check out the live musical showcases, the Reggae University sessions and conferences, the Reggae Golden Awards show, and other events designed to stamp our name and ownership on this musical brand that was born in Jamaica and that so many other nations have tried to adopt.

Reggae is synonymous with the name Jamaica. No matter where you go, what part of the world you are in, the association is made with reggae, and extended immediately to the name Bob Marley.

There is good reggae and there is bad reggae. The good reggae belongs to the Dennis Browns, The Wailers, and the host of good musicians who epitomise the best of voice, lyrics, and sweet harmony; and who blend these qualities so effortlessly into the reggae rhythm. The bad reggae, for me, is the one with the indecencies, misguided messaging, and the hoarse and coarse deliveries.

I reflected the other day on the advantage my generation had as we rode the crest of the wave of new musical styles and brands that marked the transitional steps in the 1960s to the 1970s from ska to rocksteady to reggae.

Look at the progression: In the 1940s it was the risqué calypsonians and the traditional mento bands that had our grandparents tripping the light fantastic. By the mid-1950s however, our local musicians had stepped aside and were playing second fiddle to the American big bands like Count Basie and Glen Miller. Then the big bands surrendered to the invasion of rock and roll and blues music, that had the new generation dancing up a storm with Elvis Presley, Shirley and Lee, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry.

Rock n’ Roll was awesome, and we in Jamaica were being submerged under the influence of American music piped to us through Radio WINZ and from other powerful transmitters out of Florida and Louisiana.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s and early 60s that Jamaican music finally made the breakthrough with the Higgs and Wilson first-recorded ska hit, Manny, Oh, and a wave of solid, roots Trench Town beat rhythms knocking on the door cracked open by Edward Seaga’s West Indies Recording Limited (WIRL) label.

Now, where did my generation, or rather I, come in?

As schoolboys just barely making it into the early 1960s, Manny, Oh was a totally different sound from what we had been accustomed with the American music of our early teenage dancing days. At school we had dissed traditional Jamaican mento and calypso in favour of the American rhythm and blues. In the early 1960s Radio Jamaica and DJ Charlie Babcock’s Platter Parade were busy showcasing the most popular North American music with Ben E King and the Drifters riding the airwaves.

But as we moved into young adulthood we followed the Jamaican breakthrough with the early ska music thumping away, and nothing sweeter than the Independence music of Al T Joe’s Rise Jamaica and Derrick Morgan’s Forward March.

Seaga made ska go international when, in 1963, he sent Byron Lee, Millie Small, Prince Buster, Eric Morris, and Jimmy Cliff to the streets of New York to promote Jamaican ska at the 1964 World Fair. The delegation returned with unforgettable pictures of New York’s Mayor John Lindsay and Jamaica’s Deputy Prime Minister Donald Sangster skanking away at the site of the fair in Flushing Meadows Park.

The leading bands at that time were Byron Lee’s Dragonaires, Carlos Malcolm’s Afro-Jamaican Rhythms, the Sonny Bradshaw Seven, the Kes Chin Band (father of Tessanne Chin), and the fabulous The Skatalites. They all played on the big stages, Sombrero Club, Rainbow, and Glass Bucket. From deep in the country we watched with envy as our Kingston cousins sneaked into the city dance halls and nightclubs, and on the stage of the Carib Theatre where visiting American dynamos such as Lloyd Price, Fats Domino, Chuck Jackson, Johnny Mathis, and the Drifters headlining stage shows with local artistes, like The Maytals, The Clarendonians, Higgs and Wilson, and a young and nervous Jimmy Cliff, getting a chance to open the show.

I got my chance to see The Skatalites up close when they played at the Monymusk WISCO Sports Club in Vere in 1964. The band included Don Drummond, who had been famously described by international pianist George Shearing as one of the top five trombonists in the world. In 1964 you didn’t get better than that.

Unfortunately, time was running out on the Don, who was known to be a brilliant but mentally unstable musician. Because the following year, on New Year’s Eve night, 1965, he murdered his girlfriend, Jamaica’s number one exotic rhumba dancer “Margarita” (aka Anita Mahfood), and was incarcerated in the Bellevue Hospital. The tragedy that occurred at 9 Rusden Road in east Kingston, where both shared an apartment, was a show-stopping moment in the minds of thousands of Jamaicans who had begun to see our own home-grown music as a ticket to international recognition and economic success for youth born in the ghetto. The headline of the day: ‘Rhumba dancer stabbed to death, trombonist held on murder charge’, resonates with last week’s headlines, ‘Love triangle drama’ relating the story of a soldier who shot his a policeman caught in a compromising position with his wife.

In the 1965 case, the 23-year-old rhumba dancer had just returned home after an engagement at the Baby Grand Club in Cross Roads when Drummond stabbed her to death in a fit of jealous rage affected by his mental illness. In his seminal biography on Bob Marley, Catch A Fire, author Timothy White tells us that, “It was one of the most sensational crimes since the heyday of Rhyging, and it sent shock waves through the Jamaican music industry.”

The band broke up after the incident, shaken by the public scorn and criticism of the day that categorised all musicians as ganja smokers and Rastas (in those days Rastas were not regarded as socially acceptable) and who were all very likely to arrive home late at night and stab their girlfriends.

The murder of Margarita, and the trial of one of the world’s top trombonists, is one of those stories that, in spite of its underlying tragic circumstances, should be preserved as part of reggae history.

Drummond is a musical icon and a Jamaican legend. He was educated at Alpha Boys’ School, and later taught at the school. He was instrumental in the grooming of other great Jamaican musicians such as Tommy McCook, Joe Harriott, Rico Rodriquez, Carlos Malcolm, Rupie Anderson, and others. His musical career began in 1950 with jazz band Eric Dean’s All-Stars, and he became a household name in Jamaica for his musical accomplishments and his iconic hits, among them Green Island, Eastern Standard Time, Musical Communion, Schooling the Duke, and Man in the Street.

He died in Bellevue Hospital on May 6, 1969, at age 37. Although officially explained as a suicide, reports are that there was no official autopsy, and rumours about his death continue to swirl to this day. In any case, his death was the true end of an era, but his influence lives on.

Twenty-nine days of Roots Rocking Live Reggae day and night activities have been bringing Reggae Month 2020 alive, but as said at the outset, 29 days will never be enough.

Reggae music has been more and more embraced and recognised as an opportunity for year-round investment and economic growth. I would like to propose a toast to continued good reggae music, and to a successful Reggae Month, and to many reggae years to come.