The Discography of Jamaican Music
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The Maranhão Version
By Michael Turner and Otávio RodriguesTo get a flavour of the atmosphere of the city (São Luís) there’s no substitute for staying in the historic centre, but you should be aware that there are sometimes extremely loud reggae nights which might keep you awake. -from 'The Rough Guide To Brazil'
"Yes. We must go there," agreed my friend Nelson Meirelles#. I was visiting Rio de Janeiro and we had been walking around the Feira de São Cristóvão# where we chanced upon a small dancehall, not a hall really, just a dark space between the back of a restaurant and a retaining wall where a bunch of boozed up rustics from the North were aggressively skanking to some of the strangest reggae music I've ever heard. The music was punchy, and relentlessly fast. Behind the dancers was a black light mural depicting various Jamaican sights including the Black Ark Studio with "Lee Pery" underwritten. The music was a fast sort of lovers rock, sung in incomprehensible English, and all the vocalists sounded like Eric Donaldson#. The whole scene a big puzzle. Nelson explained that this music was from the northern state of Maranhão, which was commonly referred to as Brasil's "Reggae Capital". I thought I knew a lot about reggae, but I'd never heard of it. Later Nelson contacted our friend Otávio Rodrigues#, who had formerly hosted a popular reggae radio show in Maranhão. Over the next few months Nelson and Otávio organized our itinerary and since the state of Maranhão is a great vacation spot in many other ways, our trip expanded into a family adventure that eventually comprised fourteen people.
Driving in from the modern airport, the suburbs of São Luís look a lot like Jamaica: the same cinder block buildings, knots of people waiting for a minibus, tethered animals, and the same little boy flying a kite on a red dirt futebal field. But the remarkable architecture of the old city is far superior to that of Kingston. Located on an airy bluff, its massive tile-faced colonial buildings and cobblestone streets look down towards the site where two huge rivers meet and empty into the Atlantic. Like every coastal city I've visited in Brasil, São Luís has nice weather, friendly streets, and comfortable lodgings. For three weeks our party enjoyed the beaches, seafood restaurants, street food, local cultural events, treks to the dunes of Barreirinhas, art galleries, shopping, boat trips and river rafting. But Nelson and I had come for the reggae.
Arriving at our first dancehall, Choperia Internacional, I was stunned to hear Junior Byles' "Auntie Lulu" vaulting over the fourteen foot cinder block walls. It was an auspicious moment for me, hearing this great Lee Perry production anachronistically shaking a dance the way it must have rocked similar Jamaican venues over thirty years ago. Inside was a big concrete yard, rammed with close dancing couples. Ten stacks of speakers were grouped around the perimeter, each consisting of twenty four boxes. It was so loud that they produced an unpleasant tickle deep in my skull - the vibrating ossicles of my middle ear. We quickly found a safe spot behind the speakers where we could dance. The sound system (or radiola) was playing home-made Maranhão hits, everything sounding vaguely like something Jamaican I'd heard before. One tune owed something to Peter Tosh's "Haffi Get A Beating", the next to Derrick Morgan's "Father Killam". Almost all the singers sounded like Eric Donaldson, and every song ran extremely fast. We danced and drank for a few hours and then moved downtown to a large, crowded room called the Roots Bar, where selector Jorge Black was finishing up the evening with Bunny Wailers' "Black Heart Man". And then a short walk to the even more crowded Crioula's Bar, where selector Ademar Danilo was playing a hyper mix of reggae, samba, zouk, and even some calypso. The best moment was when he spun Ronnie Davis's 1975 version of the Burning Spear classic "Tradition" and everyone sang along. The early morning found us in a small outdoor bar eating bolinhos (fritters) and drinking one last chopp (draft beer). From a speaker high on the wall came Niney The Observer singing "Blood & Fire".
Otávio explained to me that the essential term for the music here is pedra: "Pedra is the name that the Maranhense people give to special tunes. Literally a pedra is a rock or a stone, but in the sense of stone flying away to hit someone, referring to the impact of a big tune on a big sound system. A similar widely used term is pedrada: which means the hit, the very moment when the stone reaches everyone in the dance hall. Often radiola deejays tell the audience to wear a helmet in preparation for the pedras that will be flying. Some other similar radiola terms: tijolo (brick) or tijolada (boomp!), cacete (cudgel), or cacetada (kabong!).“
It all reminded me of the Wailers’ lyric about "the stone that the builder refused, becomes the head cornerstone”. The great music of Jamaica of the 70s, which everywhere else in the world has been superseded, co-opted, dismissed, or filed away, had become the cornerstone of the culture here. Somehow, in an out of the way city 3000 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro, I had come back full circle to the origins of my obsession with Jamaican music. My love for the music began in Los Angeles in the early 80s, listening to the Reggae Beat radio show, hosted by Roger Steffens and Hank Holmes. I'd previously been familiar with reggae music, but Hank's long sets of Jamaican 7" singles enduringly revealed to me how much fresher and more real the music was as played in Jamaica. It was on his show that I first heard Cornell Campbell, the Cables, Larry Marshall, the Ethiopians, Junior Byles, and scores of other great artists that were then largely unknown outside of the island. And now, here they were again. At a little beach kiosk I heard "Give Me Power" by the Stingers. On the bus, "Country Living" by the Eagles. On a narrow side street the slow approach of a car from behind me was announced by Max Romeo's "Chase The Devil". For the rest of my stay ordinary moments were punctuated by similar auditory snapshots. I heard Larry Marshall's "Can't You Understand", Hugh Mundell's "My Mind", Ken Parker's "Sad Mood", Culture's "The Rasta Man". All of this was part of the Maranhão version.
Yeah baby
Wa-oh
One single dime
Won't shine my shoe
That's what they said to I now
On Broadway.
Baby - can't you understand?
Darling - this is what they said to I.
How can I go on without money in my pocket
How can I go when you have treated I so mean.
Each and every day
My poor heart is sore
The reason why
Is because I'm so poor
Baby - can't you understand?#
But I don't want to give the impression that music lovers in Maranhão are some sort of cargo cult that worships Jamaican music uncritically. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. A pedra is actually something quite specific, chosen from a relatively narrow band on the spectrum of reggae music. It's a carefree, "country" type of sound, the sort of thing that would have been produced at Randy's or Dynamics Studio in the mid-70s; that might have appeared on labels like Jaguar, or Weed Beat, or Mighty Cloud. During my stay in Maranhão for example I didn't hear a single track from Studio One. No ska. No rocksteady. And, amazingly, no dancehall. I heard very few deejay tracks. Very few "dread" or minor-key melodies. And no dub. I learned most of this directly, the night Nelson and I were invited by Junior Black to play our records at an oldies session at his club, Kingston 777, It‘s up a flight of steps to a large outdoor terrace full of people dancing, and then through a corridor to an even larger party in a dark long room crowded with spinning couples, mostly working class people who have come to ram the dance hard. Junior played a smooth mix of minidiscs compiled from his large record collection and then turned over the single turntable to us. While the dancers never slackened, it was difficult at first to maintain momentum with just one turntable, and some of our early selections were wide of the mark as we learned for ourselves what a pedra is (and isn't). Things improved when Junior came up and helpfully pushed the pitch control up to +8, and got better still when he began mixing in his discs with our records, guiding us toward the right sound with funny tracks like Levi Williams’ “Big Fat Wife” and Wong Ping’s “Chiney Brush”. And then we played our first real pedra of the night: “Murmuring” by the Willows, an obscure GG’s production from 1973. People had been dancing all along, but now the place got warm. And hotter still when we flipped the record over to Tommy McCook’s blazing horn instrumental, and then Barrington Spence's "Getty Getty" followed by the U Roy version, then Eric Donaldson's "Lonely Nights" and on and on. Someone in the crowd declared that "finally the gringo’s coin dropped" (a ficha caiu), a Brasilian pay-phone analogy that refers to the moment when a connection is made. I felt that connection deep down in my soul - that night at Kingston 777 was one of the best musical experiences of my life.
Over the next two weeks in Sao Luis, I accumulated a lot of questions so midway through the trip I sat down with Otávio and recorded his perspective:
I was so impressed the first time I was here, in 1988. Because even in Brasil no one knows what’s going on here. I was the editor at a music magazine called Somtrês and I also had a column where I wrote about reggae and related music. So Ademar Danilo, a radio presenter in São Luís, called me saying “Man you must come to São Luís, here is the right place.“ So later I came to do a report and I saw with my own eyes. I was so impressed, they were very tuned in to the Jamaican stuff: Gregory Isaacs, Max Romeo, Jacob Miller, Owen Gray, etc. You can imagine what kind of feeling I had, considering at that time in Brazil people had no idea what Jamaican music was all about. So, throughout a week, without leaving my own country, I was absorbed by something idyllic, mystic, living a perennial summer in a sweet, sweet island – (for God’s sake, São Luís is an island too! ), listening to several artists that I loved and also many others that I never heard of before. It was the same as to discover the Jurassic Park.
Radiolas (sound systems) are not new. They are everywhere in the Northeast Brazil since the first half of 20th century, playing anything that can move a dancehall -- salsa, merengue, bolero and also “brega” # There are a lot of stories about how reggae got started here, but really, Riba Macedo (José Ribamar da Conceição Macedo) was the first to play it. He was a radiola operator who brought back the first reggae records from Belém. It reminded him of the old boleros. It has a good riddim, you can dance together, It’s enough. (Earlier, Otávio had taken us to meet Riba, who keeps his original sound system in his front room , and his 12” singles in a refrigerator. He let us look through his records, and as best I can tell, the first reggae record he bought for his radiola was "Monkey Man" by the Maytals.)
And still today, the reggae phenomenun in Maranhão is very focused on cheap and nice fun; music for dance, to be together, to drink your beer, meet someone, maybe your future wife or husband. It clearly has a social role among the poorest. (As Nelson wrote me later: "Sometimes I have the feeling they use reggae there as a forró# or any other popular rhythm, not caring exactly about what is being sung or said. Is not everyone that knows about the reggae official culture. " )
In the beginning, the radiola operators would buy their records in Belém#. Why Belém? Because it has a port connected to the Guianas, and to the Caribbean. (In the late 60s West Indies Recording Company (WIRL) and others pressed and distributed Jamaican music in Guiana.) Soon after the sound system operators went to São Paulo, and to Rio, shops that used to import reggae. Then they began importing direct from London distributors, like Jet Star, and also would get records from Brasilians traveling to Europe to work, especially Maranhao'soccer players. They were very eager to find “pedras”. Because not all reggae music is a “pedra”, good for dance halls. It must be something specific, with a kind of rhythm, a kind of groove, a kind of melody.
So then they start to go to Jamaica, to England, sometimes the USA too. And some guys attracted attention doing it, standing out as specialists. I call them the "traficantes de reggae". In general, they learned maybe one hundred English words – “good morning, good night, where I can buy some reggae records” or something like that, just enough to survive and get the music they want. Like a guy called Dread Sandro, who used go to Jamaica every month, sometimes every week, four or five times a month! Who pay him? The owners of the radiolas or dance hall clubs, who have far enough money to pay the air tickets, the hotel, and maybe something more to compensate him. There is a man named “Serralheiro" (it means "the Locksmith"), . He is almost illiterate, a simple man, but above all things he is a reggae expert. I had problems with him before in telling this story, but I will do it again, because it demonstrate how acute and practical he is, and how much he loves reggae. Some years ago he flew to London carrying a cassette tape with pre-recorded phrases, since he can't speak English. So, he could enter a taxi and just turn on the tape recorder: "Good morning. I want to buy reggae records." Incredible. I admire Serralheiro pretty much.
So, there are two men who help make reggae as important as it is here: Ademar Davilo & Fauzi Beydoun. They are friends. They had an important radio show together, and they used to tell what reggae is: 'Reggae music is a music that comes from the ghetto. Bob Marley came from there, and the rasta thing is blah blah blah". They used to translate the music simultaneously. This helped to keep the music cultural. (And continue to do so today. In addition to his club and radio work,Ademar hosts a nightly, prime time, half hour television show devoted strictly to reggae. What a country!!) Fauzi is also a singer and composer, and he has a band called Tribo De Jah#. That band is all blind guys. An interesting story. Because Fauzi bought a sound system and the man who sell the sound system told Fauzi: 'If you buy the sound system you must bring with you these blind guys.' So that was the begining of Tribo Do Jah, they were one of the first groups here which focus on reggae. Not in a Brasilian way. Usually here they put some Brasilian rhythms here and there, but Tribo de Jah played Jamaican music. And still now one of the most famous reggae bands in Brasil. So Fauzi and Ademar were the two that helped to make the thing more strong. And it is still very strong. You can count thousands of radiolas, professional sound systems. And some of the guys who own the sound systems are very rich and powerful. The radiola we heard last night (Radiola Itamaraty): the owner is a big political guy and a state deputy now, voted for sure by the reggae people -- they call them “massa regueira” (something like “the reggae mass”). And If you are against the “massa regueira”, you can be nothing, and you cannot get elected.
Here, the taste changes continually. In the late 80’s the hit parade was strongly committed to classic 70’s reggae, from roots to lovers rock, with a bent towards some obscure and almost folkloric rhythms recorded by country harmony trios. Then in the 90’s the mood changed a lot, with influences of the dance hall and soca. And there has also been the direct influence of Jamaican producers and artists, like Joe Gibbs (who even maintained an office in São Luís for a period ), Honey Boy (not to be confused with Honey Boy Martin), Norris Cole (who once sang with The Pioneers) and Eric Donaldson. Now today’s hit parade is entirely produced in Sao Luis. Because Maranhenses have always been very worried about the end of the “pedras”, the reggae that they loved. They used to ask me what do I thought, if the pedras would end up. So about six or some years ago, local studios began to make some versions. First, they'd take an excerpt (of a Jamaican song) and make a loop, and then put some different voices over. Now it's gotten to the level that almost 100% of the music in the dancehalls is local. “
This new Maranhão version is produced in matchbox studios just like in Jamaica. The sound is unremarkable, just simple keyboard melodies and bass loops, automated one drop beats and hectic fills; no live horns, no live percussion. You can find tons of the stuff on the beach and at the street stalls. It’s always played fast of course, for it exists only to mobilize the young dancers thronging the nearby dances. I brought back a few sampler CD's that sound nice to me, but I haven’t made any converts from listeners back home, who all complain about the cheesy sound. One of the music’s obvious virtues is its untiring cheerfulness, lacking entirely the bile that flavors so much of modern Jamaican music. Leonard Dillon said of Jamaica in the 60s that the music was sweet because the people were sweet, and this is also true of the music of Maranhão. Many of its melodies and song structures are derived from Jamaican predecessors, for example on Hot Star Reggae Collection Volume I, you hear echoes of tunes like the Blue Bells’ "Call Me Teacher", The Pioneers'"Blues Dance", the Upsetters’ "Dirty Dozen". The universal use of English is an even more interesting borrowing. Although the Maranhense artists love the sound and rhythm of English, few actually speak it, so the lyrics are sung in a sort of gloss. Half-listening can be pleasant as the brain assembles unintended word associations from the discrete words and phrases found amidst indecipherable syllables. Sometimes this effect is charming, as in Rosemary’s Cool Runnings:
"Good runnings is just good runnings,
Runny every way and I want it every day"
Other times it’s mysterious, on Donny Jones’ No Cowboy I hear:
“I saw that car, a biggest car, surprise
I had no gun and no cowboy
And I lost in a far land"
Mostly though the songs have simple lyrics straight from the Jamaican songbook, typical sufferer lyrics and reality tunes. "Down here in Babylon” is a narrative that applies too well to a place that shares many of Jamaica’s social problems: Maranhão is the poorest state in Brasil, with a per capita income of 960 US dollars per year, and has the highest infant mortality rate:
Whoy, Whoy, what a situation
The people have the suffering
Down here in Babylon.
It‘s starvation and misery
Children dying from poverty
And no one can do something to change
Every day is the same old song
I don’t know what is right or wrong
But Jah can change this place.
(Peter Toty, “Sufferation”)
The best thing about this music is the singing. After all, Brasil is the most musical country in the world, and it’s unsurprising that all the vocalists on these compilations are very, very good. They sing with economy and ease and perfect pitch, and share that characteristic Brazilian ability to express sadness and happiness at the same time. One artist I especially liked is Dub Brown, a guitar-toting guy who I met at Hot Star Studios - he sounds a lot like a young Leo Graham. And there are many, many young artists more. .
It’s likely that I hear many good things in the music because I experienced it in such a pleasant context; and because of my saudade# for this fantastic place. But I think the music of Maranhao has tremendous potential. After all, it's place of comparable size and demographics to Jamaica, with many cultural and historical parallels, and an equal if not greater enthusiasm for the music.
Reggae is a sort of living thing, the flowering of hundreds of years of cultural development in Jamaica. When it spread abroad it hybridized with various other genres: in the UK, with soul and later punk; in the USA, with rock and then hip hop; in the Third World it cross-pollinated with countless local genres. But in Maranhao, it grew, not as a hybrid, but as a clone. It's a unique musical culture that has flourished in isolation. Otávio describes his first encounter as a Jurassic Park experience, and you can still feel some of this excitement twenty years later. I'm hoping to go back soon, perhaps to the annual reggae festival that happens there in July. But if not, eventually. Who knows? Maybe someday you'll walk into the Kingston 777 and find a gringo at the turntables, listening to his coins drop.