“We never had much time to rehearse proper because the boys were working. Sometimes they left work and went straight to the gig.”
— Ossie Roberts, Soul Brothers, Ossie & The Sweet Boys, The Alphabets
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street”, one of the signature Motown hits in the 1960s, was a great ode to happiness, to the kind of untrammelled joy that arrived when Black cultural expression and high record sales coincided for the good of all – “There’ll be swingin’, swayin’ and records playin’”. But the song also came to resonate with the riots that set alight Los Angeles and Detroit, ignited by the police brutality prevalent in African-American neighbourhoods.
The year before the release of “Dancing in the Street” the inspirational Civil Rights campaigner Medgar Evers had been assassinated in 1963, part of the tragic bloodletting that occurred as White America wrestled with the refusal of Black Americans to be second-class citizens, culminating in the deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and lesser-known white activists such as Revered James Reeb. All this took place against the divisive backdrop of the Vietnam War, for which African-Americans were disproportionately drafted. Shut out at home, then shot at abroad.
That conflict was much more than a national trauma for the USA. It reminded the world that the legacy of imperialism involved large-scale loss of life as decades of slicing up overseas territories sparked power struggles and attendant cycles of violence. The Vietnam War of the 1960s grew, of course, from the anti-colonial Indo-China War of the 1950s when the colonial power was France. International protests against the Vietnam War, notably at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1968, were defining social and political events of the decade.
But nothing was clear cut in the struggle to decolonise. The granting of independence to countries formerly under British rule brought to a head massive problems as well as opportunities. The civil war that ravaged Nigeria was a calamity waiting to happen. Nigeria, as a British dominion, had been more or less created by the ambitious industrialist George Taubman Goldie in the late 19th century, and the complex issues of ethnicity, religion and politics created by this yoking of dissimilar peoples and cultures had never been adequately resolved during the colonial period. What made things worse were the behind-the-scenes roles played by Britain and other world powers such as the Soviet Union and France, lending support to opposing sides according to their own national interests.
Whilst the Vietnam War eclipsed the Nigerian Civil War or Biafran War, as it was known, in the attention it received, the latter was also one the great geo-political calamities and human catastrophes of the 1960s. It is believed that from 1967 to 1970 between 1.2 and 3 million died in Nigeria, not to mention the legacy of orphaned children consigned to a life of malnutrition and displacement.
Far away as these conflicts seemed from the music scene in the UK, their effects were nonetheless marked. In the USA, the influential composer Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris, saxophonist Frank Lowe and violinist Billy Bang1 were just a few of the African-American jazz artists packed off to Vietnam. In Britain, some Nigerian musicians resident here were not content to follow the news of the Biafran hostilities from the safety of the BBC World Service. So they swapped horn and guitar for rifle and pistol.
The Mancunian saxophonist, Tosh Ryan, a regular collaborator with West African musicians at Moss Side clubs such as The Nile, recalls that there were many departures from the musical scene because of the Biafran conflict. “Yes, a lot of my friends went back to fight in the Biafran war. They were just gone very quickly, really. It was a sad thing to see, because people that you’d seen in good circumstances, you had known on stage with smiles on their faces playing music, had to leave in fear for their families and loved ones back at home. The whole thing was tragic.”2
Yet whilst music and war seem contradictions, for some of the poor and the disenfranchised, particularly in the USA, the military offered stability, and sometimes an improvement in circumstances for those who were still searching for a direction in life. And some of the musicians who signed up did not let their muses go. They still played guitar. They sang. Occasionally, their destinies followed a course that few had predicted.
Courtesy of the US Army
The middle of the 1960s saw the arrival in Britain of two artists linked by their experience of the military. One was still wearing fatigues, but the other displayed a sartorial flair ill-suited to the homogeneity of khaki. Geno Washington’s3 (1943–) and Jimi Hendrix’s (1942-1970) names are seldom mentioned together, but they are bound by the common denominator of their brief military experience. Hailing from Evansville, Indiana and Seattle, Washington, respectively, Washington and Hendrix both enlisted in the air force. In 1962, roughly a year into his service, during which time his musical proclivities were neither appreciated nor encouraged,4 Hendrix was discharged from the 101st Airborne after sustaining injury from a parachute jump. Washington maintained grade A physical condition and worked as a U.S.A.F. gym instructor – no doubt one of the reasons he was able to deliver such incredibly energetic stage performances.
Washington, the singer, was rooted in gospel whereas Hendrix, the guitarist-vocalist, was deeply anchored in the blues, but had a maverick, outlandish, if not surreal spirit that nudged his self-expression towards shock and awe. In his formative years, this earned dismissals from several R&B bands whose leaders felt that he was stealing their thunder, or committing the heinous crime of refusing to cut his hair.
Washington was brilliantly of his time. Hendrix was of a time to come, though, ingeniously, he never severed his umbilical cord to time past. He said that he was always looking for “today’s blues”, but what he really found was “tomorrow’s blues for today.” Musically he stretched time.
Washington, initially stationed from 1965 at an air force base in East Anglia, did one-off gigs as a guest vocalist with R&B bands in London before he came to the attention of the guitarist Pete Gage. Gage thought that the singer would be the perfect front man for a new combo – Geno Washington & The Ram Jam band, a well-drilled soul ensemble fuelled by Washington’s relentlessly gutsy, uplifting vocals.
Issued in December 1966, their debut album Hand Clappin’ Foot Stompin’ Funky Butt… Live! was a substantial seller that spent 38 weeks in the album charts, the result of the strong support the band garnered from their endless round of gigs. The album was recorded in concert, and showed that Washington and the Ram Jammers were a very engaging covers band who could play the Motown and Stax hits of the day with great proficiency and feeling. None of the repertoire was original.
In contrast, Jimi Hendrix, who came to London in 1966, although he made his breakthrough with a reprise of the brooding folk-rock standard “Hey Joe”, was essentially defined by his own writing. The originals recorded on his two landmark albums – Are You Experienced? (1967) and Axis Bold As Love (1967) – showed how excitingly the blues and R&B vocabulary that Hendrix had learned in his youth could mutate and expand in the mind and hands of an imaginative artist. His guitar/vocal-bass-drums three-piece unit, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, remains one of the greatest examples of a small group capable of producing a molten orchestral power that succeeded in vividly capturing the tenor of the times.
The term guitar hero is inadequate for Hendrix. His virtuosity with the six-string guitar is inseparable from the imaginatively wrought lyrics, focused drama of the voice and a wide range of sculptural, tonal distortions from his embrace of technology. Hence the cracking and cleaving of the wah wah pedal on “Voodoo Child [Slight Return]” is not an addition to the heart-stopping image of a mountain “chopped down with the edge of my hand” but a foretelling of it. Mass, so powerfully expressed in the image of the steep, high rock, is one of the defining characteristics of Hendrix’s aesthetic, and the chords that follow the snarled intro convey the quality of air-sagging weight, the kind of oppressive high summer humidity where sweat can feel solid rather than liquid. This sensation of thickness and heaviness marks a logical progression from the crashing bulk that is summoned by the bass guitar on some of the defining pop records of the mid 1960s, a key example being Spencer Davis’ “Keep On Running”. Listen to that bass next to the guitar on a Hendrix cut and you hear how the pop of the era is hardening up tonally, from low to high register. Physicality of this kind had been part of the electric blues of Chicago since the 1940s. One has only to listen to Muddy Waters for confirmation. But Hendrix, along with other British groups like The Yardbirds, The Who, Stones and Cream pushed further down the evolutionary road of a new sensibility in rock, in which an even greater density of tone and volume would materialize.
Further, beyond the guitar hero image, Hendrix never forgot his role as a team player, and whilst attention has tended to focus on his lead guitar work, his quality as a rhythm guitarist should not be overlooked. The way that Hendrix accompanied other musicians, such as when he comps behind the saxophones and trumpets on the jazzy “South Saturn Delta”, and enhanced the percussive attack of a song, particularly by foot-stomping his pedals, remained part of the core vocabulary of Black music. His roots in R&B were never denied. But Jimi used them in a different way to his peer Geno. The former largely found chordal and textural richness in the guitar; the latter in a horn section. Yet the strength of the blues was encapsulated in both their personal aesthetics. They were related but they were very different.
Both Hendrix and Washington returned to the States by the late 1960s, but programmers were astute enough to put them on the same bill prior to their departure. Audiences who attended a spectacular event called Barbeque ’67 at Spalding in Lincolnshire would have seen them along with Cream, Zoot Money’s Big Roll band, Pink Floyd and The Move – a lineup that showed that the rich heterogeneity of popular music. Its spectrum of soul and rock, and new offshoots such as psychedelic rock had led to neither a partitioning of styles, nor of Blacks and Whites. Rock as a genre was rapidly evolving to reflect major issues in politics and society, just as blues had done, while state of the art technology was bringing forth radical new sounds, certainly in the hands of Hendrix. The strain of experimental thinking that galvanized him and some other groups of the time showed that there was no clear division between what might be seen as pop and what could be called art.
So many of the iconic images of Hendrix show him on stage with a stack of towering speakers behind him. Inevitably, he, and the likes of Cream, made rock synonymous with the stadium, yet Hendrix’s aesthetic also contained the finesse and understatement of his ballads. There is the eruption of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, but also the deep pathos of “Little Wing” – an indication of both the complexity of Hendrix’s character and the emotional resources of blues culture. As Huxley intimated in Brave New World, the blues is at its most gripping as a “slow” tune, the format that can manifest vivid confessional states and lay bare the deepest feelings. In the electric church that Hendrix creates in his playing, he presents rock as a form of music that can successfully accommodate both introspection and aggression.
Rocksteady with a Slower Beat
Nothing may seem farther removed from Hendrix than the West Indian music that he probably heard while he was living in West London. Slow songs have always had a place in West Indian culture; ballads and crooners were hugely important in the rituals of courtship and romance. The great popularity in West Indian homes of country & western and pop-jazz balladeers, from Jim Reeves to Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine was a reflection of this. Tales of heartbreak, love, loss and longing were the foundations for seduction at a basement club or a dance. Music played at slow tempos gave the chance to get close to somebody who was worth getting next to at a house party or “blues”.
For West Indian ears, there was a clear divide between the heaviness of a Hendrix-style electric guitar and the lightness of strings and brass and at this point in time there was a preference for the latter. The texture and tempo of music in Jamaica was changing. Ska had evolved into Rocksteady, which was slower in rhythm, with, as the name suggests, a mellowness and leisure in the beat that made it greatly appealing to dancers. Although it featured a heavy bass guitar, often played with forthright syncopation, rocksteady was also an unabashedly romantic music, as typified by stellar vocal groups such as The Paragons whose 1967 hit “The Tide Is High” was an example of the continuing quality of writing and arranging in Kingston. Like ska before it, rocksteady also found favour with British listeners, both West Indian and beyond. When people were right in the heat of the “blues”, a rocksteady tune signalled the moment to “just lean up somewhere or… on somebody… and rock…nice and easy.” 5 Many rocksteady hits were silky songs, laced with violins, a key feature of “The Tide Is High”, tugging gently at young lovers’ heartstrings.
It is easy to forget that British rock and Jamaican rocksteady were more or less contemporary. Between them they highlighted the complex, multifaceted nature of African-Diasporic culture in its American and Caribbean manifestations. To rock could mean to make a loud, manly (Muddy Waters) sound, to convey aggression, but it could also mean to tantalize and tease, to move in a sensual and relaxed (Ken Boothe) way, in line with the lyric “take your time/there’s no need to hurry.”6 Rock, like swing had done before it, was now beginning to fulfil the dual function of noun as well as verb. It was a genre and a behaviour.
Hearing musicians play hard and heavy rock music was not wholly to the taste of West Indians for whom rock signified a steady form of dance music, though that didn’t mean that they could not appreciate the work of a rock artist who had sufficient emotional intelligence and tonal delicacy to realize that music played with a restrained energy could also have tremendous communicative power.
Manchester Again
Variety was something understood by Oswald Roberts, a Jamaican vocalist-pianist who had arrived in Manchester in 1961. Roberts was a joiner by trade who played music in his spare time, having learned the rudiments in the Salvation Army in his native Kingston. He became a member of an R&B group, The Fiestas, subsequently the Soul Brothers, who gigged regularly around town. They also played rocksteady because: “At gigs that we did we had to play any and everything, like a whole range of songs people liked.”7 Invited to London to make some demos for Polydor, the ensemble morphed into Ossie & The Sweet Boys and landed a support slot to none other than the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Speakeasy in 1967. Ossie had a close-up view of the man and his music. “He was very, very quiet, just sat there on his own in the club, with his little bottle of spirit, very mellow, you know”.7 Roberts also has a strong memory of how he feels Blacks in Britain actually perceived the rock star’s repertoire.
“‘Hey Joe’ was the main Hendrix song that West Indians liked, that was one of our favourites… because it was very slow, with a nice melody. He wasn’t playing that much, and at the time the West Indians didn’t listen to bang, bang, bang… they listen to the arrangement. There wasn’t a lot of chords, but the arrangement was there. It’s like the rocksteady, sometimes it’s only two chords but you can follow it.”8
Ossie also puts Hendrix’s Speakeasy performance in a wider context of Black music. “What I heard on the night, it was excellent, for the limited amount of musicians,” he noted. “Just the three of them! I was amazed at the sound. I never heard the guitar played like that, apart from the soul guys like Steve Cropper, when he was with Booker T. Sure, Hendrix had a connection to R&B and soul, and he could play jazz as well,” Ossie continued. “I heard him play a few things I never expected, it was not only rock. I call him a versatile musician; it’s like when I first heard Chuck Berry. It’s mad, mad, mad, loud, loud, loud, but I saw the other side with him playing his Nat ‘King’ Cole. I saw Hendrix the same way, I heard the soul in his music. It meant something.”9
Mancunian, African-Caribbean soul singers sharing the bill with African-American rock guitarists in London is a good symbol of the geographical movement and stylistic alignments of the mid 1960s, and the brief intersection of the destinies of Ossie and Jimi also points to the transience of the period because their paths would soon diverge. Roberts returned to Manchester while Hendrix headed back to the States.
Although the 1960s is generally regarded as the moment when any one with a guitar, two chords and a decent tune could make it, the truth was that many with more than a modicum of talent did not. Effective management and the iron will to seize on any opportunity was essential, as was holding one’s nerve under pressure. Recording sessions couldn’t be fluffed and good producers and engineers were also vital.
Ossie recalls that the original members of his first group, the Soul Brothers, “couldn’t cope with the studio” or the idea of cutting tracks in London, which is why they stayed in Manchester, leaving the singer to go ahead with the aid of the keyboardist and guitarist from the Vagabonds, the band of the popular Jamaican soul vocalist, Jimmy James, who had also shared bills with rock acts such as The Who and Hendrix. Hence the revamped Soul Brothers had little rehearsal time and, inevitably the chemistry wasn’t there. “My boys in Manchester would have done a better job because we knew each other,” Ossie reflects. “But they got cold feet. I got teed off myself and came back up north.”10
Of all the obstacles that a young band had to clear, the question of their mindset is perhaps the most intriguing. For many groups with good stage presence, the onus was on playing the hits of the day. They were flesh and blood jukeboxes who had to bring to life what people were listening to on the radio. There was no immediate incentive to write original material as the already popular song, rather than the new artist – certainly in the eyes of the major labels and publishers who held such power in the music industry – was the saleable product. In part, they were absolutely right because the phenomenon of the covers band, be it the ‘Bootleg Beatles’, or an Elvis tribute act, still appeals to large numbers of people in the 21st century, because everybody has their song, and a real desire to hear it or, impelled by a karaoke fantasy, sing it themselves.
Yet the first or third person narrative from a new perspective, in a new setting, in a musical framework with new instruments such as electric guitars, with their unapologetic hardness and loudness, constituted an irresistible paradigm in post-war pop. The three minute rock & roll song was a template for a must-hear story in the hands of a skilled raconteur. Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” is a masterpiece because it depicts a three-dimensional character. It is an engrossing vignette that paves the way for other burgeoning writers because it conveys the circumstantial drama of the “country boy” who “never ever learned to read and write so well” but who “could play the guitar just like ringin’ a bell.” Denoting triumph in the face of adversity, the lines show that an apparently blighted life can be transformed by talent which can be shared with the world.
Those who followed suit had to believe that they were capable of producing something worthwhile, and that there would be a demand for it when they did. A tale of teenage sexual angst that also cleverly evoked the modernist totems of the car, radio, TV, cigarettes and “girl reaction” was waiting to be told. The Rolling Stones did so with “Satisfaction” and its significance is not just that it is a great song, but that they had the chutzpah to perform it when Mick Jagger didn’t have a great voice, and they were sufficiently audacious to put the melody into a world populated by great singers from the blues in which the song was rooted. They wrote an original song rather than cover someone else’s. Otis Redding would show them just how to sing it in due course, but the Stones had dared to make “Satisfaction” theirs before it was claimed by another. They had a resolute desire to succeed, which was facilitated by their presence in London. Ossie Roberts made a vital connection with an up-and-coming music industry mover and shaker from Jamaica whose impact on British music we have already charted, but a combination of diffidence, the North-South divide and the more pressing matter of keeping up with the rent meant it came to nothing.
“Sometime in the early ’60s I went to London with a friend and we met Chris Blackwell,” recalls Ossie, who after the demise of the Soul Brothers, led both The Sweet Boys and The Alphabets. “We played him a song we’d written and he loved it and he invited us back down. But we never went! We just didn’t. In them times, it was very little money a week that you worked for, but work really did come first. It made it difficult for the music. We never had much time to rehearse proper because the boys were working. Sometimes they left work and went straight to the gig.”11
In a situation where work was hard to find for a West Indian, holding on to any job had to come first. Although a skilled cabinetmaker, Ossie did not have a builder’s union card. To obtain one he had to have… So, ironically, in the end Ossie actually earned his living from music because he was unable to secure steady work in the trade for which he was formally trained in Jamaica. By the late 1960s, the unemployment rate among Blacks in big cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, London and Leeds was steadily rising.
Back at home in the West Indies, particularly Jamaica, things were not much better, as the dreams of post-independence sovereignty and shared prosperity crumbled rapidly. Large numbers of young men traded rural poverty for urban destitution, fuelling the phenomenon of the violent “rude boy”. This was a subject compassionately treated by Desmond Dekker in his song “007”, with its illuminating sub-title: “Shanty Town”. Whether one was trying to make ends meet in Kingston, Brixton or Moss Side, to be black was to be poor, to be born a sufferer. There was a middle class in Jamaica, but it was much more likely to be brown rather than black.
This was also the case in other parts of the ex-British Empire. Decolonization had wrought enormous demographic changes all over Africa and the Asian sub-continent, and rapid urbanization often compounded already low standards of living. Yet while poverty could foster rebellion, generations of colonial rule produced people who retained deep attachments to aspects of Empire by way of colonial education and Christianity. Former colonials were likely to have several things in common, chief among them a love of Shakespeare, cricket, tea and, in the West Indies, Christianity.
East Meets West
Two significant musicians from different ex-colonies who came to Britain had some of those very ties: the Jamaican Joe Harriott (1928-1973) and the Indian John Mayer (1929-2004). Both had been born into greatly disadvantaged circumstances in their native lands. Both came to Britain and made a significant impact on “art” music.
Indians had been in Britain since the 17th century when servants were recruited to serve noblemen, and there was also a large number of seamen or lascars in the merchant navy. Indian recruits or sepoys made an invaluable contribution to the British army in both world wars, and many chose to settle in England at the end of their tours of duty. Although 1948 is considered a landmark year because of the mass migration from the West Indies, 1947 had seen the arrival in Britain of Punjabi Sikhs following partition, when Britain’s decision to create the sovereign states of India and Pakistan had led to immense population shifts, upheaval and tragic bloodshed. Between the early 1950s and early 1960s the number of people of Indian and Pakistani origin in Britain increased from 43,000 to 112,000. 12
Fleeing a desperate situation, the majority came with nothing. In some cases the amount of money they arrived with was as little as three pounds, with perhaps a few extra notes sewn into a woman’s sari. Poor housing and factory work was the lot of the majority – when employment could be had – because of the prejudice of many employers against traditional dress.
But there were also a few students who gained graduate traineeships in the commercial sector and a number of scholarships for those who had shown aptitude in the arts. This was the case of Mayer, born in the Calcutta slum of Chandni Chawk and forced to take handouts in many places of worship as a boy. He incurred the wrath of his strict, Anglo-Indian Catholic family when it transpired that his precocious ability on string instruments had led him to play violin outside several local Protestant churches.
He came to London in 1952 when he was 22 years old, after being awarded a grant to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Prior to his arrival in England, Mayer had gained a grounding in Western and Indian classical music and his talent later saw him flourish as a violinist with two major British orchestras, the London Philharmonic and then the Royal Philharmonic.
Mayer then began to write original pieces that were culturally adventurous. “Raga Music for Solo Clarinet” was a witty, daring combination of Hindustani and western classical music that was well received in classical circles. Greater prestige and recognition came in 1958 when Mayer composed Dances of India for Indian instruments (sitar, tablas and tanpura) as well as flute. The piece was performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.13
Alto saxophonist Joe Harriott14 came to London in 1951. He was 23 years-old and had already gained a formidable reputation for himself in Kingston, Jamaica as a player of tremendous virtuosity, who drew inspiration from American bebop stars such as Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt. His playing had the kind of energy and creativity that soon caught the ear of experienced danceband leaders in the city. Like several of Jamaica’s ska and jazz legends, Harriott had attended the Alpha Boys School. Harriott found a kindred spirit in the equally adventurous and forward-thinking trumpeter Dizzy Reece.
Britain was supposed to be nothing more than a stopover on a European tour for Harriott as a member of singer-pianist Ozzie Da Costa’s band, but he decided to stay, and quickly made his mark on the London scene when he joined modern jazz ensembles led by Tony Kinsey and Ronnie Scott. Able to improvise fluently while negotiating the demanding chord changes of bebop, Harriott worked regularly and by the mid 1950s was leading his own groups and recording mostly in his own distinctive version of the bebop genre. However at the end of the decade, he made a dramatic stylistic left turn. Instead of composing according to the strictly regulated “head-solo-head” structures of bebop, he started to write in a much more mercurial, structurally fluid way, as can be heard on Free Form (1960) and Abstract (1962).
The composing on these albums was predicated on his conviction that music can convey great imagery – “I want to paint pictures in sound”. His work reflected a similar kind of intellectual dynamism to musicians such as the African American alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, insofar as they were questioning the existing paradigms in jazz. Moving away from set chord sequences appealed to Harriott. Working in a more harmonically ambiguous way fired his imagination, as did introducing melody in the final phase of a performance, so that it appears as the culmination rather than the starting point of a solo. Some of his finest pieces are explorations of an idea that centres much more on subversion than affirmation. For example, “Tempo” is about stillness as well as motion. “Calypso” is not a calypso as one would expect, but a playful scrambling of its patented rhythm, a deconstruction-reconstruction of a form that makes much of pause and swerve rather than a steady pulse. “Compound” is essentially a series of intricate conversations between drum kit, congas and bongo which brings forth a number of highly melodic phrases before the arrival of the piano, bass and horns in the coda. It’s a bravura arrangement insofar as it plays with the prevailing expectations of jazz listeners. One imagines that the horns will arrive much earlier and that when they do they will signal the beginning of the piece in earnest, not its end. In this song, percussion is primary, brass and reeds are secondary. This was not the norm in jazz. Harriott’s thinking aligned him loosely to a movement in American jazz that was known as the avant-garde or free jazz, precisely because of its greater organizational unpredictability. This “New Music”15 moved away from improvisation that was strictly based on chord changes towards a degree of spontaneity that would eventually lead to performances that had no pre-composed parts at all.
Whether avant-garde or not, Harriott was a highly intellectual and cultured individual who envisioned a world in which boundaries between aural and visual expression dissolved, and a song could be a single thought, explored from various angles, rather than a linear narrative. Free Form is essentially about the compositional process as a series of implications and enigmas rather than clear statements and resolutions.
Harriott came to work with Mayer by way of the producer Dennis Preston. His Lansdowne recording studio had been a success and his work across a range of genres – jazz, calypso and classical – had given him extensive business contacts and, more importantly, an acute knowledge of the particular strengths of musicians. Preston had recorded both Harriott and Mayer individually, (The former’s Freeform, the latter’s Nine For Bacon) and hit upon the idea of putting the two men together.
The result was a ‘double quintet’ comprising Mayer’s personnel – Diwan Motihar (sitar), Chandrahas Paigankar (tanpura), Keshav Sathe (tabla) and Mayer himself (violin, harpsichord) and Harriott’s – trumpeter Eddie Blair, pianist Pat Smythe, double bassist Rick Laird, and drummer Alan Ganley. The group made its debut in May, 1966 in Chichester, and in the same year Indo-Jazz Suite was recorded. Between 1967 and 1968 two more sets, Indo-Jazz Fusion I and Indo-Jazz Fusion II, followed. These three albums form a fascinating chronicle of cultural ferment in post-war Britain. Here was a blend of African-American, Indian and European classical forms performed by black, brown and white musicians, hailing from Jamaica, India, Scotland, Ireland, England, and later, Canada (Kenny Wheeler). Here were the East Indies, the West Indies and parts of the Commonwealth creating what marketing now calls “World music” in London.
Mayer’s command of the raga, with its fixed scale of notes generating melodic statements and tala, a cycle of beats that differed from the 4/4 structure of jazz, imbued the music with a palpable sense of warp and weft, whereby flurries of motifs hold the attention because of their constant interweaving. Counterpoint is paramount. The brass and reeds are frequently deployed in overlapping lines, like a simultaneous text and subtext, while the percussion moves as a series of odd and even numbers, so that a ten beat tal can be counted as 2.3.2.3, a sequence in which the addition of the extra beat in the second and fourth unit generates a simple but nonetheless effective spike of internal tension.
The result is music that has a wry, subtle stop-start motion, the delicious paradox of the fluid stutter, precisely because the differing sub-divisions in the beat are much like changing inflections in speech. Time, the way it is conceived and observed, is a central foundation of music, because the length of a performance, and the manner in which the players create a pulse, a sensation of regularity or irregularity, consistency or interruption, pushing forth or holding back, depends entirely on choice. The decision to place an accent on an offbeat as opposed to an onbeat, to count a certain number of beats in a bar, or to play at low rather than medium or high tempo, is almost inevitably absorbing. Indian music thus presented more options in the realm of meter. The intricacies of the tala created a stimulating sense of unfolding in time so that movement and momentum were experienced in a very different way to the four beats per bar prevalent in western music.
To hear John Mayer and Joe Harriott perform compositions based on the mathematics of the tala was, and still is, engrossing because it unveiled an assortment of organizing numbers rather a single one. There was no reason why 10, 12, or 9 could not be as important as the blessed 4. Tala reminds us that time is a subjective entity, that its points of departure and closure vary according to the imagination, and that if a cycle has a first beat there are many options as to where the last will fall. All of which conjures a wealth of emotions and ambience. The enormous sense of release, or rather rebirth that is created by the beginning of a new sequence attests to this richness. It is like a life cycle.
Having said that, Mayer occasionally had Harriott’s drummer lay down a pulsing 3/4 rhythm that was much more synonymous with jazz, around which the tabla player twirled tricky variations on the beat.
Interesting as the structural and rhythmic finesse of the Indo-Jazz series is, the gorgeous timbres of the music also captivate. Harriott, responding to the rhythmic and metric intricacies of the music, reveals a slightly more tempered aspect of his playing, often with a light, dancing tone, as if he wanted to draw flickers rather than fire from his saxophone. As for Mayer, in his role of arranger, he showed an inspired touch in bringing together the flute and sitar, as these offer a thrilling dynamic range. The low velvety purr of the former and the high keening twang of the latter impart a combination of softness and steeliness that is enticing, particularly on Indo-Jazz Fusions II, where the woodwind is often like a whistle that drifts around the sitar, whose distinctly metallic, bell-like clangs exude a sense of great authority. Hissing under both of them is the tanpura, the unerring drone that underscores the circularity, the suggestion of the possible eternity, of the raga cycle. This constant bed of sound highlights the darting phrases above it.
These were sensational new sounds in the mid 1960s. Familiar though it is today, the sitar was a great discovery, an instrument that is sometimes lazily described as a ‘weird guitar’, but which had a very distinct sonic identity, as was proven by its most masterful exponents.16 The west was opening up to timbres that had not been heard before and the use of the sitar on the Beatles’ very beautiful song “Norwegian Wood” was a foretaste of Harriott’s and Mayer’s collaboration.
Jazz artists from Yusef Lateef to John Coltrane had also turned towards the organizing principles of Middle Eastern and Indian music as a logical extension of their path towards a means of expression that was universal rather than local. A raga scale was as stimulating to progressive improvisers as an Arabic mode or a Russian folk melody. These all presented new points of departure.
The contemporary music industry often draws lines between genres, but the affinity that existed between certain exponents of raga, rock and jazz – their shared hunger for new sounds – was such that the hypnotic sound of an Indian sitar could inspire an electric guitarist as much as a soprano saxophonist. Ravi Shankar, John McLaughlin and Coltrane seemed kindred spirits in unforced musical communion.17
If there was a grand fantasy British musical meeting, it would surely have been Jimi Hendrix sitting in with John Mayer and Joe Harriott. They all happened to be living and working in Britain at the same time, all pushing the boundaries between popular and art music. It never happened, but the three can be seen as crucial additions to British music in the 1960s because their “massalas” of blues, jazz, rock and raga still act as templates for musicians several decades down the line. Axis Bold As Love and Indo-Jazz Fusions are not often mentioned in the same breath, but they are part of the same heritage of ground-breaking recordings of this time.
Obviously, what raised the visibility of Hendrix above that of Mayer and Harriott was the fact that he worked in a genre with bigger audiences, and that his flamboyance drew massive media attention. In an age when there were parts of Britain where the cliché that locals had never seen a person of colour was actually true, his individuality, his blackness on his own terms, would have appeared all the more striking. There is an apocryphal tale of an early gig in Newcastle, hometown of Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler and a place with a minimal black presence, during which Hendrix put his guitar through the ceiling of the venue, much to the delight of the punters, some of whom then proceeded to draw around the hole to mark it for posterity, possibly as a shortcut to heaven.
Two Women Step Out of the Background
While in the 1960s, Blacks in both America and Britain were striving for real social equality, women took up the same fight. Campaigns to end discrimination in employment, particularly on the issue of equal pay, came at the same time as the introduction of the pill gave women more control over their own bodies. In the music industry the position of women was no less difficult and many talented women were not permitted to develop on their own terms – a matter both of male sexism and the absence of women at executive and management level. But women were not silent on the matter. As the singer and mother of three children, Aretha Franklin sang: All I’m asking for is a little respect… just a little bit… just a little bit.
But there was a tradition of female blues artists with the brio and raucousness that make them a match for any man. Following Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the mid 1960s, a new face appeared on television pop music shows and on many large stages up and down the country. This was P.P. Arnold (Patricia Ann Cole, 1946–),18 a member of the Ikettes, the trio of backing singers-dancers who appeared with the ultra-dynamic duo, Ike & Tina Turner. They had one of the great show-stopping revues in R&B and, after several years of touring in the States, landed a support slot with the Rolling Stones in Britain. Hailing from a Los Angeles family of gospel singers, Arnold had an immensely soulful voice and quickly came to the attention of the Stones manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who offered her a contract as a solo artist with his own Immediate record label. Arnold accepted, quit the tour in 1966 and stayed in London. The decision paid dividends in the short term as the singer enjoyed a string of hit singles, several of which were penned by Paul Korda (“The Time Has Come”) and Cat Stevens (“The First Cut is the Deepest”), which were fine combinations of crafted musical arrangements and vocal prowess. Peaking at number 18 in the UK singles chart in May 1967, the latter, with its delicate verse and swooning chorus, is a song that is well rooted in pop consciousness because it has been covered a lot over the years, but Arnold’s version remains definitive. She makes us believe that the story in the song is her experience, her heartache, her pain, rather than just an evocation of something experienced by another. She is a convincing storyteller.
Sonically, the arrangement of “The First Cut” is fascinating. Its constituent parts are similar to many Motown songs of the era: strings, electric rhythm section and brass are all used, and the way the pounding backbeat of the chorus shatters the introspective calm of the verse is a classic example of sound used as an echo of emotional content. Yet despite the obvious gospel richness of Arnold’s voice, the song retains an Englishness because of the deep folk inflections of the melody. The theme has a kind of down-through-the-ages afterglow and the prominent use of the harp in the first part of the arrangement serves to heighten that implication.
PP ARNOLD
COURTESY PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Apart from her solo singles, Arnold also worked with one of the most important British bands of the 1960s, the Small Faces, a group, like the Kinks, with a distinctively English sensibility. While their formative musical culture of rhythm & blues was always audible, co-founders and writers-in-chief, Steve Marriott’s and Ronnie Lane’s melodic sensibilities often seemed more than a million miles from Memphis, Tennessee or Detroit, Michigan.
“Tin Soldier” was a moody, bluesy Faces song that featured potent backing vocals from Arnold and remains one of the most interesting products of the transatlantic cultural cross-pollination of the day. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, with its black lead singer and white sidemen, had made a multi-racial British rock group a reality, but the sight of the Faces with their hippyish threads, long hair and guitars, and Arnold, with her more conservative coiffure and garb on the set of a French TV show, Bouton Rouge, in 1968, crossed the lines of gender as well as race and nationality. The rarity of this scenario underlines how strict was the division between the male beat combo, where each member would be a fan’s favourite, and the solo girl singer, instrument-less and backed by a band tucked into the shadows.
As far as transatlantic black female soul singer/white male rocker collaborations are concerned, the other very notable example is that of Madeline Bell19 and John Paul Jones, bass guitarist of Led Zeppelin. Theirs was an excellent writing partnership that produced “What am I Supposed to Do?”, the B-side of Bell’s 1968 single, “Picture Me Gone”. Like Arnold, Bell had sung in the church as a child and the first group that she joined at the age of sixteen was a gospel ensemble called The Glovertones. However, it was musical theatre that brought her to Europe. She appeared in Black Nativity, a show written by African American poet laureate Langston Hughes, which premièred in New York in 1961, before moving to Europe. The 1962 London performance was well reviewed and, as the tour came to an end, Bell, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, chose to settle in the city. The parallel with Arnold’s journey was clear.
Blessed with a rich, strong voice and compelling stage presence, Bell was initially promoted as a cabaret artist, and taken under the wing of Norman Newell who had managed and made Shirley Bassey a major star. Patrons at the La Dolce Vita nightclub in Newcastle were able to see Bell on the same bill as Lionel Blair and Les Dawson. But that was not the extent of her artistic ambition and, since that time, Bell has been one of the great eclectics of the British music industry, working across jazz, soul and pop as well as doing theatre and studio session work. Her output has been staggering. From singing on jingles and commercials, as well as being a first-call backing vocalist at the chart-topping end of pop, where she worked with Cliff Richard, Elton John and Dusty Springfield, Bell became the American expatriate artist whose work the British public is probably more familiar with than it realises. But, regardless of how far she has ventured into the mainstream, Bell, who made her solo debut in 1967 with the album Bell’s A Poppin’, has excelled when working with artists whose core vocabulary is the blues. If the Small Faces did well to enlist the services of P.P. Arnold, then Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker made an equally wise choice in asking Bell to provide backing vocals for them.
MADELINE BELL
COURTESY PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
What the cases of Bell and Arnold – and Jimi Hendrix and Geno Washington – show is that African-Americans who had talent and the right management team could succeed in the rapidly developing British pop market. More importantly, Bell and Arnold question our understanding of what is termed a “backing vocalist”, often faceless and uncredited, a bit-player kept out of the spotlight by the lead singer.
The history of American pop reveals that some of the best black vocalists and harmony ensembles were recorded, but only for their work to be attributed to white singers who would mime to their tracks, and the prevalence of misogyny in the music industry, in which producers, white and black, were largely men, made for a high incidence of exploitation. Bell and Arnold were proof that given the opportunities, the best backing singers could thrive as artists in their own right. They often had the ability to improvise beyond the lines they were given to perform. Bell and Arnold were creators as well as singers.
Notes
1. A poignant expression of the experience of African-American Vietnam vets is the pair of albums recorded by Billy Bang, Vietnam The Aftermath (Justintime, 2001) and Vietnam: Reflections (Justintime, 2005).
2. Telephone interview with the author, October, 2013.
3. On Geno Washington hear, Sifters, Shifters, Finger Clicking Mamas (Marble Arch, 1967).
4. Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic (London: Faber & Faber), 36.
5. A commonly expressed summary of a typical blues dance.
6. Hopeton Lewis Rock Steady (Merritone, 1966).
7. Telephone interview with the author, May, 2014.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid,
11. Ibid.
12. Asian immigration continued to rise with the expulsion of Indians from Kenya, Uganda and Malawi in the 1960s and ’70s. See Mayerlene Frow, Roots of the Future.
13. Interview with the author, London, 1998.
14. See Alan Robertson, Fire in His Soul (Northway, 2011).
15. New Music was also a term used for avant-garde jazz in the mid 1960s.
16. A complaint I have heard many times from Indian musicians over the years.
17. See John McLaughlin and Devadip Carlos Santana, Love, Devotion, Surrender (Columbia, 1973), where both guitarists vividly channel the spirits of Coltrane and Shankar.
18. See www.pparnold.com
19. See www.bell.com