root salad Gilzene
Gilzene & His Blue Light Mento Band are reviving reggae’s ancestor. Jon Lusk meets them at Womad.
R
ushing towards the place where Gilzene & The Blue Light Mento Band are playing an hour ahead of schedule at Womad in Wiltshire, I slacken my pace as the familiar chorus of Brown Girl In The Ring comes drifting from the Big Red Tent. Inside, said band are dispensing gently swinging sounds and smiling warmly at an adoring audience, who seem pleasantly surprised at the number of familiar songs. A few minutes later, Rivers Of Babylon – also popularised by ’70s disco icons Boney M. – provokes more grins of guilty pleasure.
Stage right sits dreadlocked ‘rhumba box’ player Courtney Clarke, plucking his seven-keyed instrument with his left hand and banging on the body with his right, almost as if playing a cajon. He also ‘toasts’ occasionally, and incites a sing-along, his animated stagecraft contrasting with the still, serenely smiling presence of octoge- narian banjo player, Wesley Balds. Backing singer Donnette Leslie shakes a pair of maracas from time to time and almost duets with lead vocalist Lanford Gilzene, who is resplendent in a bright yellow shirt, and strums an acoustic guitar.
“These songs is our old revival classical songs,” Gilzene anounces in lilting Jamaican English before the band start up No Night In Zion, which fans of reggae stars Culture and Luciano also know.
Backstage later, I meet Gilzene and his talkative co-producer Sam Clayton, who is a mine of information about the roots of mento. “Mento is Jamaica’s first popular music that was made or created specifical- ly as party music,” Sam explains in his more worldly, Americanised English. “It was dance music, nothing to do with religion.”
Instead, just as in Trinidadian calypso – which Sam speculates may even have derived from it – mento lyricists discussed current events, politics and domestic affairs in comical verse, usually disguising its meaning in double entendre. This tradi- tion dates from slavery days, when such songs sometimes passed secret messages between plantations.
“So all the slave masters would be dancing and laughing about the funny stuff that the guys were singing about,” Sam continues. “Meanwhile there was a second meaning [like]… ‘Let’s go burn this place!’”
The same harsh conditions that inspired music of defiance and subversion also gave rise to deeply religious genres; Gilzene’s previous recordings include an album of gospel songs. With other artists, Sam plans to make albums of syncretic Kumina trance music and Revival styles, of which No Night In Zion and No Sin (both in Gilzene’s set, though not on his internation-
al debut Sweet Sweet Jamaica, see fR321) are examples. Revival songs deal exclusively with the notion that the souls or spirits of the dead are revived in the next life.
“This was the only thing that gave them hope, ‘When I die, I’m obviously going to a better place, because this can- not be it, this life is so horrible’,” observes Sam. “So they actually saw death as some- thing to be glorified.”
S
ecular but also popular, mento had its heyday between the 1930s and 1950s, before changing fashion consigned the style to Jamaica’s tourist hotel circuit, where it remains a musical staple. “All the musicians who played a big part in the invention of ska were mento musicians, of course,” says Sam. “Ernest Ranglin, members of the Skatalites. Bob Marley’s first record was a mento song, and Toots [of Toots & The Maytals], his first recordings were all mento songs.”
Sam’s co-producer Stephen Stewart has long worked with Toots, who contributed the only overdubs on Sweet Sweet Jamaica. After hearing Gilzene’s mento version of his classic Sweet And Dandy – recorded in a single day of rough and ready takes of around 30 songs – Toots was imme- diately inspired to con- tribute, as Sam recalls:
“He said ‘I have to do something on that song. I’ll come back.’ He came back with a bag full of harmonicas, and said: ‘I wanna play one of these on this song, because it doesn’t need any voices.’ And he played about three or four harmonica tracks and then went back and said: ‘You know what? I wanna hum!’”
It may seem puz- zling that a man of Gilzene’s generation – born in 1956 – should have become a mento musician, but his expla- nation is simple: “When I was a little child, my dad, you know, he usual- ly play mento [singing and accompanying him- self on guitar for his
own enjoyment]. So what I usually do in the evenings, I usually sit and listen. It was so mellow, so at that time I say to myself: ‘I would like to be a mento player and singer.’”
By the age of 12 or 13, he had begun to write his own songs, having gleaned enough from his father’s own music and records. And another family member would help him tweak his compositions: “One of my aunts, she was a singer and songwriter. When I write the songs, she would check the lyrics… yunnerstan me? And if the lyrics, they not put in the right place, arrange in the right way, she would say: ‘Put this here, put that there’.”
When I wonder aloud whether the name of Gilzene’s band has any particular meaning, he chuckles: “Well, Blue Light is a name that just came… out of the blues!”
www.myspace.com/gilzeneandthe- bluelightmentoband
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Photo: Judith Burrows
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