DON COSMIC LIVES!!

perhaps the most revered and controversial instrumentalist-composer to come out of Jamaica. After the death of saxophone legend Charlie ‘Yardbird” Parker in 1955, the graffiti “Bird Lives!” became common around New York City. I have appropriated that phrase for the similarly legendary Don Drummond.

Even the most prestigious  and scholarly music  admit that very little is known of his early life. From a recording standpoint, he first emerged around 1956, amidst the then nascent sound system movement, contributing horn breaks on what were then known (and still so called now in some circles) as specials. Several of these would be later released in the UK, to great acclaim (but little, if any direct remuneration) on Chris Blackwell’s Island records imprint.

With the advent of the 1960s, Drummond, like many of his contemporaries, were increasingly drawn to and influenced by the twin strands of the global Black nationalist movement and the more distinctly homegrown Rastafari  ideology. Without a doubt, this must have placed him and his bandmates in sharp variance with the  Establishment who frequented the better clubs to witness their live performances. Whether this exacerbated Drummond’s  then already well known mental difficulties (schizophrenia? Manic-depression?) cannot be said with certainty.

It didn’t help either that his live-in girlfriend was Anita Mahfood, an exotic dancer popularly known as “Margarita”. Mahfood, though part of the economically powerful Kingston merchant class was herself a bit of  a “wild card” and her relationship with the troubled genius was no doubt tumultuous. That tumult reached a grisly and tragic crescendo in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1965, shortly after Mahfood returned to their East Kingston apartment.  There were reports of an argument and screams. In the aftermath Mahfood, then only 23, was found dead from multiple stab wounds.

Drummond was arrested and – in a bit of a whirlwind – tried, deemed “legally insane” and remanded to Kingston’s Bellevue Hospital. That brings us back to May 6^th, 1969, the day he died, but not to the end of controversy. With no autopsy performed, Drummond’s death was ruled a suicide, an “official” version that remains contested by conspiracy theories of various sorts to this day.  The hospital staff, one claims, ruthlessly beat and otherwise ill-treated Drummond, all with the tacit permission of the then Government, which was bent on stamping out this “Black Power nonsense” (It was hardly a year prior that rioting broke out in the wake of the Government’s decision to expel pan-Africanist Walter Rodney); others claim that Mahfood’s family had extracted revenge for her demise at Drummond’s hands.

The full truth has very likely been interred with the body, but, selfish as it may seem, in the wake of Drummond’s departure, we have the tremendous treasure of the music. His official recorded output has been put at over 300 songs.   No matter how often one hears classics like “Eastern Standard Time” or “Confucious” or “Man In The Street” the warm idiosyncracy and fleet-footed, “hop-skipping” energy (my coinage) of Drummond’s playing and compositions shines through. This goes not only for us here in Jamaica, but for music lovers worldwide

Which brings to mind, as an aside, What is it about the month of May anyway?

Bassist Lloyd Brevett recently made a painful, and by all accounts untimely, transition (precipitated by the tragic shooting death of his son), leaving drummer Lloyd Knibb as now the only surviving member of the original musical aggregation known as the Skatalites who helped shape and popularise a distinctly Jamaican sound, enjoyed in the four corners of the earth.

 Incidentally(?) May is also the month in which Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd checked out of this earthly realm. He left us, in 2004, on May 5 to be exact, or one day before (36 years after) Drummond did. It was in Dodd’s famed Studio One that Drummond and the Skatalites not only laid down their own recordings, but as the de facto “house band” provided support for a host of other Jamaican musical legends.  “Don Cosmic” as he would also come to be known, first caught Dodd’s attention during a performance at Kingston’s Majestic theatre

But back to Drummond. To borrow a very apt summation from noted musicologist Herbie Miller, “He was a musical prophet created by the people, not one imposing himself on them in pursuit of stardom, but having it thrust upon him. Drummond observed their tribulations and aspirations then reshaped them into a blues allegory reflected through his compositions and plaintive trombone tone.”

In my own humble estimation, Don Drummond was an original, a “one-of-a-kind” from a nation that seems to specialize in “one-of-a-kind” people. Whatever format you can get it in, get hold of his music and – in a very good way – let him blow your mind.