Gregory Isaacs, Jamaican reggae singer, died this morning in London (as reported by the BBC and other media).

Nicknamed “Cool Ruler”, Isaacs was once described as “the most exquisite vocalist in reggae, his pliable baritone equally at ease with silken ballads and slinky dance grooves.” His best known song is the title track from his 1982 album Night Nurse:

Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin (at left), moments before their execution; Port-au-Prince, November 1964

. . . on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered.

Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seem to be the clothes in which they’d been captured — khakis for Drouin and a modest white shirt and denim-looking pants for Numa. They are both marched from the edge of the crowd towards the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs by two of Duvalier’s private henchmen, Tonton Macoutes in dark glasses and civilian dress. The Tonton Macoutes then tie the ropes around the men’s biceps to bind them to the poles and keep them upright.

This week, the CRB is very pleased to publish an essay by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, excerpted from her new book. She begins by telling the story of the execution of two young Haitian activists, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, at the order of the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. This event, Danticat explains, is one of her personal “creation myths.” The story of these brave young men is her starting-point for a bracing consideration of the importance of literature, of the act of writing and the act of reading, in dangerous times:

When it was a crime to pick up a bloodied body on the street, Haitian writers introduced Haitian readers to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which had been rewritten in Creole and placed in Haitian settings by the playwright Franck Fouché and the poet Felix Morisseau Leroy. This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art.

How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway.

How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book? After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer’s courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the first place.

Also published in the CRB this week: the latest in our special series of film reviews, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival. Ian Craig looks at Los Viajes del Viento (The Wind Journeys), a “road movie” set along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, directed by Ciro Guerra.

Finally, this week we launch our new music column, which focuses on new releases from underexposed Caribbean genres as well as classic recordings and performances of the past. It begins with B.C. Pires’s review of The Longest Kiss Goodnight, the latest album from the Trinidadian rock band jointpop (your Antilles blogger is a fan), and John Robert Lee’s essay on the late St Lucian folk singer Sesenne Descartes and her classic 1991 album, now scheduled for re-release.

Jenny Alpha, Martiniquan singer and “grande dame de la culture créole,” died on Wednesday 8 September in Paris.

The RFI website posted a short obituary:

A familiar figure in French jazz clubs, Alpha crossed paths with actress Josephine Baker and musician Duke Ellington. After the Second World War, she campaigned for recognition of Creole culture, at a time when the poets and activists Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor were fighting for the promotion of black conciousness.

Originally from the French overseas territory of Martinique, Alpha moved to Paris in 1929 to become a teacher. She soon started singing bossa nova in French cabarets and music halls.

In a tribute to Alpha, French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand said that “as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sedar Senghor had become advocates of negritude, she devoted all her energy and talent to the defense and recognition of Creole culture.”

She continued to perform well into her hundredth decade, appearing on stage in a production of The Cherry Orchard when she was ninety-four, and releasing her most recent album, La sérénade du muguet, at ninety-eight.

This five-minute documentary was created earlier this year to mark Alpha’s hundredth birthday:

Probably the most iconic image from any Caribbean film: Jimmy Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin in The Harder They Come

The CRB’s chief interest, as our name makes clear, is books. But it’s also clear that no art form is isolated or insulated from others, and literature is part of a creative continuum with visual and performing arts. From early on, the CRB has tried to engage with Caribbean art especially, as well as film and music, and in the magazine’s current online incarnation we intend to expand our critical focus to pay more sustained, serious attention to these forms of creative imagination and thought.

Tomorrow the September 2010 issue of the CRB will begin publication. I’m very pleased about two particular elements. First, later this month we’ll launch a regular music column, in which we’ll publish reviews of new releases in a wide range of Caribbean genres, as well as short essays on specific musicians and composers, significant songs and albums of the past, events, trends, and musical phenomena. Second, the September CRB will include a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010.

This is the CRB’s second partnership with the ttff, who previously supported a small section of film reviews in our August 2008 issue. This month’s special section is more ambitious: for the duration of this issue, we’ll publish a new review each week of films drawn from the ttff’s 2009 and 2010 programmes. (The films for review were selected by the CRB, and the reviews independently commissioned; the reviewers’ opinions are their own, not the ttff’s.) We’re grateful the ttff recognises the importance of creating a critical context for the work of Caribbean filmmakers, and we hope this initiative is the beginning of more regular film coverage in the magazine.

You can find out more about the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010 at their website, with news and updates at the festival blog.

It is a stuffy Thursday afternoon, thunder is rolling off in the distance, and your Antilles blogger is hunched at his desk, trying to clear through miscellaneous CRB paperwork, as we prepare to wrap up the current issue of the magazine and begin publication of the next. Les Loups Noirs are keeping me company. The Haitian “mini-djaz” ensemble, specialising in a blend of traditional compas with jazz and rock-and-roll influences, were wildly popular across the French Caribbean in the 1970s. “Jet Biguine” gives you an idea why. The track was included in Tumbélé: Biguine, Afro & Latin sounds from the French Caribbean, 1963–74, recently released by Soundway Records (here’s a review by Joe Tangari).

And here’s another Loups Noirs track, “Cap Haïtien”, which starts wistfully then becomes a cool little dance number:

Lady Saw

BLVR: Do you separate from the Lady Saw people see in the dancehall when you’re not onstage?

LS: You know, a friend of mine recently told me how she saw me onstage one night, and I came down off the stage, and a man said something to me. And I told him: “Lady Saw — she’s done right now. That was Lady Saw there, she’s done now. I’m Marion Hall, talk to me.” Marion Hall is a homegirl. You see how hard it was to get me out? [Laughs] I stay home, you know? I don’t have a lot of friends. I have a lot of fans, not so many friends. I stay home, I feed the dogs, I bathe the dogs. I have a farm up in Ocho Rios, I’m there. But I’m boring, you know — until it’s time to touch the stage.

— Jamaican dancehall performer Lady Saw, interviewed by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the July/August 2010 issue of The Believer.

Sesenne Descartes. Photograph courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre

My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings,
a voice with woodsmoke and ground-doves in it, that cracks
like clay on a road whose tints are the dry season’s,
whose cuatros tighten my heartstrings. The shac-shacs
rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles
of childhood, an old fence at noon, bel-air, quadrille,
la comette, gracious turns, until delight settles.
A voice like rain on a hot road, a smell of cut grass,
its language as small as the cedar’s and sweeter than any
wherever I have gone, that makes my right hand Ishmael,
my guide the star-fingered frangipani.

— Derek Walcott, from “Homecoming”, in The Bounty

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“Manmay la dit wai!”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

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Marie Selipha “Sesenne” Descartes, St Lucian folk singer and “queen of folk culture,” died on Wednesday 11 August in Mon Repos.

The poet John Robert Lee has written an obituary of Sesenne published by the St Lucia Folk Research Centre. He describes her public debut in the early 1920s:

Sony [Sesenne’s father] had plans to start a La Rose group in the Micoud area and he needed a lead singer. Sesenne was then posed with the challenge of being lead singer/chantwelle of that new La Rose group. Sesenne was about eight years old at the time. Her father first informed her mother of his decision to place her in the group because he believed she was the best individual to become the chantwelle. Sesenne accepted and she took her first bold steps into folk culture history. Sesenne said of her distinct and pristine voice, “Everyone was envious of my voice” and “when I sang I could be heard in Magretout.”

At the peak of the La Rose celebrations in Mon Repos, a huge crowd of La Rose fans awaited the commencement of the séance. Sesenne realised that the crowd was growing impatient, so she requested that coffee be served to the people in an effort to curb their increasing frustration. The ushers at the séance organised many teacups to be filled with coffee for whoever wanted a drink. And as if that was not enough, Sesenne asked the ushers to cut the two cakes that were gifted to the La Rose group into small pieces so that everyone could get a taste. The people were all appreciative of that gesture of genuine hospitality. When all of that was done, Sesenne stepped onto the stage and sang these words — “ah ya yai mamai La Rose, pa plé wé!” — the crowd went into an uproar.

Read more about Sesenne here.

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“Pale Edward ba mwen”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

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“Mais oui, ça vrai”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

“Mais oui, ça vrai”

Si mwen di ’ous ça fait mwen la peine
’Ous kai dire ça vrai.
Si mwen di ’ous ça penetrait mwen
’Ous peut dire ça vrai.
Ces mamailles actuellement
Pas ka faire l’amour z’autres pour un rien.

Translation by John Robert Lee, published in Elemental (2008):

If I tell you that affair grieved me
you can believe it’s true,
if I tell you you tore up my heart,
you can say yes, it’s true.
If I tell you you pierced me
you can believe I tell the truth.
Young people of today,
you do not make your love for nothing.

Portrait of Bob Marley on a t-shirt, Amsterdam; photograph by mdemon, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

You posit the theory that Peter Tosh was just as talented as Bob, but for various reasons would never achieve the kind of overall popularity he did. What was it about Marley that has made him worldwide the most recognisable face and voice of reggae music?

He never wrote a bad song, and his songs contained the essence of great truths. His life in the simplicity of the country had imbued him with an understanding of his existence that came from watching things grow.

Plus, in a way that is unlike any other contemporary singing star, he was fired by his public love of God — of the good. Utterly charismatic as a performer, his shows channeled the soul of positivity, with utterly transcendent consequences.

It is also naïve to pretend that Bob’s physical appearance didn’t help: his Anglo-Saxon features and light skin perhaps made him less threatening to white audiences.

— From an interview with Chris Salewicz, author of the newly published Bob Marley: The Untold Story, by Bob Ruggiero in Houston Press. Salewicz — a British music journalist who lived in Jamaica from 1995 to 1997 — previously collaborated on Songs of Freedom, a book of Marley photographs by Adrian Boot.

Marley would have turned sixty-five this year. To mark the anniversary, Putumayo World Music has issued Tribute to a Reggae Legend, an album of Wailers covers by musicians from around the world, working in various genres. And the Putumayo blog has started a series of video interviews in which musicians and others reflect on Marley’s global legacy. The first features Reuben Koroma of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. (You can also hear the All Stars’ version of “No Woman No Cry”. Thanks to CRB contributor Georgia Popplewell for this link.)

(From the CRB archive: Geoffrey Dunn’s review of Bob Marley, by Garry Steckles, published in our November 2008 issue.)

Your Antilles blogger is spending the long Emancipation weekend at his desk, slogging away at CRB correspondence and copyediting, and kept company by the wistful, sometimes eerie melodies of the Haitian composer and musician Frantz Casséus. Specifically, I’m listening to the Haitiana album he made with the soprano Barbara Perlow, originally released in 1969 and now available from Smithsonian Folkways.

I can’t find any of the tracks from Haitiana on YouTube, so instead here is Casséus playing the “Lullaby” from Haitian Dances, recorded in 1954.

There’s a lovely memoir of Casséus by his protégé Marc Ribot in the Winter 2003 issue of BOMB. As a lagniappe, here is Harry Belafonte’s celebrated 1956 recording of Casséus’s song “Mèci Bon Dié”:

Lincoln Barrington “Sugar” Minott, Jamaican reggae and dancehall musician, died on Saturday 10 July in Kingston.

The Jamaica Observer reports:

Minott . . . earned for himself the moniker Godfather of Dancehall. He is credited with being the pioneer, who, by laying vocal tracks over the original tapes from the 60’s, rather than using a live band — as was the norm in those days — caused a revolution in the sound that brought a new style to reggae music known as dancehall.

Adam Sweeting’s obituary in the UK Guardian adds:

Other artists had done this in live performance, but Minott brought the technique into the recording studio, triggering a revolution in Jamaican music.

According to Minott’s official website, his latest album, New Day, is scheduled to be released later this month.