theartsdesk Q&A:
Musician Jimmy Cliff
One of reggae's breakout stars speaks on everything from Peter O'Toole to bongo drums
Sunday, 22 July 2012The ever cheerful Mr Jimmy Cliff
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.
In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Jamaican musician who turns to crime, and composed much of its classic soundtrack. Songs from it such as “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “Many Rivers to Cross” would go on to become among reggae’s most renowned. Cliff was now an international star, a peer of Bob Marley, and toured extensively, building huge fanbases in Africa and South America. Throughout the Seventies, after leaving Island, he produced a series of albums that stylistically pushed reggae’s boundaries before returning to his roots with 1981’s Give the People What They Want. He was heavily involved with Steve Van Zandt’s Artists Against Apartheid in the Eighties and has worked with a wide range of artists including the Rolling Stones and Elvis Costello.
He currently has a new album, Rebirth, his first in eight years, and is touring some of the summer’s festivals, including Camp Bestival next weekend. I meet him in a central-London hotel on a Sunday lunchtime. Casual of dress, svelte of figure, smiley of face and shaven of pate beneath a cap he continually toys with, he sits down in a booth in the bar area with a coffee (or possibly hot chocolate), and answers my questions in a keen, gentle voice tinged with a West Indian lilt.
THOMAS H GREEN: Have you seen Julien Temple’s film about Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten?
JIMMY CLIFF: Actually I’ve not but that’s one I want to see. I’ve been too busy.
The reason I ask is because he was a friend of yours. Was he an influential figure in your life?
I wouldn’t say influential, more inspiring. We have a sameness of mind. When we used to meet we never had time to sit and talk, until the last time, doing “Over the Border” on my last album [Black Magic]. We had time to talk for two weeks. I liked his mind, very bright he was. I miss him.
Listen to Jimmy Cliff and Joe Strummer's "Over the Border"
And on your new album you cover The Clash song "Guns of Brixton", a great song. What do you reckon to the affiliation between punk and Jamaican music?
Punk addresses the political and social issues in the same way. Of course musically the punks adapted something from reggae and put it with rock and came to a unique music style. To be a punk you’re against the system and we were like that in reggae so there was a kinship there.
You cover the Joe Higgs song “World is Upside Down” on your new album too. Tell us about him.
He was a very important character in the reggae business. I knew him before this but a notable thing was he taught Bob and the Wailers harmony. Joe Higgs loved to be of service. His head was full of knowledge but he didn’t write a lot of songs. The few he wrote are so profound. He had another song called “Songs my Enemies Sing”. He was an amazing figure. He didn’t have dreadlocks but he was a true rasta.
You updated the lyrics, singing lines such as “so much war and poverty whilst you enjoy prosperity”.
Joe Higgs’s take was maybe not as universal as mine but he meant the same thing. Joe understood a lot about the church and state psychology, which is global. Where communism rejects the religious side of things - he said if they reject that, they’re a religion themselves, so Joe understood the political system of the world. I’m glad you asked me about him because he’s one of the unsung heroes.
You’ve worked with so many, such as Dean Fraser, the saxophonist – talking of whom, would you say the jazz abilities of Jamaican musicians have been unfairly overshadowed?
Go back - at beginning of ska, of reggae, all those musicians were jazz musicians. We came in with maybe an idea about the song and they would frame it for us. I had in mind a long time ago to write a book called The True Story of Reggae because of all these unsung heroes. People need to know about them because they see the light bulb shining but they don’t see the transformer, to know where the power is. Jamaican jazz is really underappreciated – Dean Fraser, Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook, Lester Sterling, Headley Bennett, [Stanley] Ribbs, all great sax players. Of musicians generally, Ernest Ranglin was voted the number two guitarist in the world at one time. He used to come over here and play jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. I would go as far as to say that, as a guitarist, Ernest Ranglin could give George Benson a run.
You worked with the troubled but brilliant bassist Jaco Pastorius a couple of years before his death in 1987. How did you find him?
Sometimes people are really brilliant - you can call it troubled, but he was brilliant. He came into the studio and he liked me, he give me a big hug, then he wanted to show me who he was. He put his bass down on the ground and he started to jump around it and the bass started playing something. People think he’s crazy but something came out of that bass.
As I understood it, by that stage in his life he was pole-axed by a combination of mental illness, booze and drugs.
He certainly did have problems, but maybe the music kept him alive.
What’s your earliest memory?
In the mountains as a baby, three years old, eating what we call wet sugar, the sugar made from the cane where the mule turns it to get out the juice, they’d turn that to wet sugar. This lady who used to sell it in a big tin would say, “Come here, boy, sing like your mother, laugh like your mother,” and she’d take some sugar and give it to me.
What did your parents do?
My parents were farmers. My father was also a tailor and my mother was a great cook, but most of my family were farmers, whether ground provisions or sugar cane, also cattle, cows, goats. I had to participate in that world but I hated it. I was like the odd man out because when it comes to that I’d go and hide somewhere. “Where is James? I can’t find him.”
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Five Must-See
Jimmy Cliff Videos
BY Jim Allen
How important is Jimmy Cliff to the legacy of reggae? Well, to conjure up a rough idea, combine the careers of, let’s say, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, and you’ll have the rock world’s approximate equivalent. At the tender age of 13, Cliff was already filled with enough fire to talk Kingston, Jamaica restaurateur/record shop owner Leslie Kong into becoming a producer and starting a label to release the budding reggae prodigy’s material. Ultimately, Kong became one of reggae production’s foremost pioneers, and Cliff was scoring hits when most kids his age were still in high school. The 1972 movie The Harder They Come, starring Cliff as a Jamaican singer who lapses into a life of crime, was the Big Bang of reggae on an international level. The soundtrack — unfailingly the one reggae album you’ll find even in the collections of non-reggae fans — introduced the world to such Cliff-penned reggae standards as “Sitting in Limbo,” “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” and of course, the title track.
The tireless troubadour, now 64, has never halted his musical journey, and Cliff’s new album, Rebirth, finds him tapping into his roots while reaching out to a whole new generation of listeners. Produced by Tim Armstrong of Rancid, the record puts Cliff’s ageless croon atop endearingly old-school arrangements, but amid the singer’s own material, there are also a couple of covers of tunes from the rock realm: The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and Rancid’s “Ruby Soho.” Not only should it surprise no one that Cliff achieves a complete takeover of both cuts, but the original artists would probably be the first to admit it. With the reggae legend revving his engine anew, it’s a good time to take stock of some stellar moments from Cliff’s panoramic past.
1. “Give A Little Take A Little”
Reggae History 101 will tell you that American R&B is one of the basic building blocks for the sound that started out as ska, evolved into rocksteady, and finally settled into reggae. If you’re in the market for an emphatic reminder of that fact (not to mention a taste of Cliff’s pre-Harder They Come career) this soulful 1967 clip from Germany’s famed Beat Club should do nicely.
2. “Many Rivers To Cross”
Just one of the many reggae milestones found on the Harder They Comesoundtrack, this song has emerged as a modern spiritual on the order of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” or Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Like those tunes, “Many Rivers To Cross” has been covered relentlessly over the years — everyone from Linda Ronstadt to U2 has tackled the tune. It’s fascinating to see Cliff kick into it at the 1970 MIDEM music conference at Cannes, introducing it as “a song from my next LP.”
3. “The Harder They Come”
For millions of people, the image of Jimmy Cliff remains inseparable from his role as reggae roughneck Ivan in the film that introduced him to the world at large. This classic scene with Cliff’s character cutting the movie’s title tune never gets old. FYI: the man whose beaming visage you see behind the board at about 0:40 is uberproducer Leslie Kong himself.
4. “Trapped”
In the early ‘80s, Bruce Springsteen started honoring Cliff’s catalog by including this cut from the latter’s back catalog in his live repertoire. In 1985, both Bruce and Cliff ended up doing their bit for Ethiopian famine with the inclusion of The Boss’s recording of “Trapped” on the We Are the World album. But as this early-‘90s Letterman clip shows — with Cliff supporting an album that included a revamped version of the song — even Springsteen can’t beat the master at his own game.
5. “Guns of Brixton”
Besting Bruce when it comes to one of Cliff’s own tunes is one thing. But when the Jamaican giant takes on the killer Clash cut “Guns of Brixton” — still one of the most exciting intersections of punk and reggae ever recorded — for Rebirth, Rock Hall of Fame inductee Cliff makes it clear that he can give even England’s proudest punks a run for their money.
>via: http://www.mtvhive.com/2012/07/17/best-jimmy-cliff-videos/