Check out my latest recording session for West Indian Rock. This my first attempt at nailing vocals for my collaboration with Jamaican Mento musicians in Port Antonio.
This song came to me when I was in Mantis Gardens in Arlington pulling giant fan leaves of marijuana plants that loomed above me. I had returned from my first trip to Jamaica emboldened.
This verse and chorus melody came to me and I couldn’t grab my travel guitar, so I flipped my phone’s recorder on and captured it before my moment with the universe was lost. At my first 10 minute break I worked out the chords, trying to keep them as straight forward as possible like a real Mento song.
On my return to Jamaica, Lenni I-Music brought me back to Port Antonio and Devon Bradshaw of Burning Spear’s Axxe Studios to record this song with Joseph Whitmore and Bull. I funded their traditional Mento album on the first trip with my own money and some seed money BJ DjSticky (Bluejay aka Dj Sticky ) gave me, in a bid of good karma.
Broke as I am, I still help local scenes I visit in my own way, and that was a cool way to invest a few hundred in my new friends and music teachers.
Well Karma came around around this time when I brought them a song they inspired, one year later. They had Jah T, the guitar man from the current Jolly Boys line up in tow. Jah T liked the song when I showed it to them the morning of the session, and he loved my voice the night before I sat in on their gig at Goblin Hill. But he said the arrangement and changes were too complex to be Mento.
He had a point, but that’s when Lenni I stepped in and made a speech in his patois about how I am really a Rock & Roller like Bob Marley was a Rocka, and how I didn’t come to Jamaica just to copy Rasta. I came to make a Hybrid. Something new. Something part Jamaican and part American.
It was an awesome speech I only understood 3/4s of. Jah T was silent for a moment, then smiled because he understood. He started seeing the cross over potential, in how a “big song” like this could get folks other than just tourists interested in this potent and influential style of Jamaican folk. Mento never became well known, because Columbia Records called Harry Belefonte’s album stocked full of Mento hits, Calypso.
And so began the 1950’s Calypso craze, built on Mento songs.
“Daylight come and me wanna go home…”
My generation has had the Banana boat song lodged in our head since the film Beetlejuice. The Bon Marche even bastardized the song in an advertising campaign planting that steel hook even deeper in my skull. Belefonte’s, a New York son of Jamaican parents, brought the world the version that somehow popularized the beat and buried the brand, to know fault of his own. He did create the folk boom Dylan rode to Rock stardom, and probably World music as we know it.
☆ I am hoping I can get Scott Rowe, Roxanne Abbott, Lewis Harding, and Alex Roberts AKA Bedlam Isle, interested in helping me put out mix of this we can aim at British pop radio. They are trying to start their own Brit Folk revolution in Brighton and this is Folk AF.
I hear them all on this song. Plus two more Jolly Boys on Rhumba box and banjo. Thanks to Lenni I and his man about town with co-production skills that pay bills. In a mighty white mini van he rides.
This here is a mix of business and brotherhood.
…and Mento, Country Western, and Seattle soul.
Davin’s new song has been released and has become a global earworm and Caribbean dancehall hit. Listen here on Reggaeville: DAVIN MICHAEL STEDMAN & ANTHONY RED ROSE – FREE YOUR MIND FEAT. SLY & ROBBIE WITH LENKY MARSDEN. The video is now available on Youtube.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many ventures, such as the AMAZING blog, 100milesofmusic.com, and is one of the driving forces behind the Staxx Brothers. This past spring he spent weeks networking in and reporting from Kingston, Jamaica. He will return there soon for more recording. His single with British band Sherlock Soul is now available as well.
