Friday 05 July 2002

Friday 05 July 2002 / Miles Davis Hall
A Reggae night with Rootsman

Click on the Artist name who will be performing at the Reggae Night :

Capleton and the David House Crew / Beres Hammond and the Harmony House Family

Alton Ellis, Michael Prophet, Dennis Alcapone / DJ Asher Selector

	Berres Hammond
	No one in reggae turns it out like Beres Hammond. It’s not just that mellow, whiskey – grained voice working deep, sultry sex at the low end of the scale, then spiking to rapturous heights. It’s not even those breathless old school “please please please” stylistics or even the huge canon of achy breaky love songs that makes the front – row dawtas scream so loud! It’s the sobs at the back of his throat crowding his beatific face, as if this tender – hearted strongman’s about to break right down and cry. Audiences have been begging this reggae legend for more since 1972, when as a teenage schoolboy, he took first prize at an amateur talent show with covers of “Peridia” and Jerry Butler’s “Need to be Loved”. The crowd said I should do them two again,” Hammond recalls. “So I had to do them three times more. I felt good. I didn’t know much about the dangers of being on stage then. Now me 'fraid!” he laughs. Not too afraid to have created A Day In The Life, Hammond’s latest release on VP Records. A Day In The Life finds reggae’s ranking soul man in top form. As usual, he skirts all the cliches, instead tracking the subtle nuances of romance with rare sensitivity and insight. Opening track, “Always Be There,” makes a quintessentially fervent Hammond love pledge. But promises are made to be broken, as Hammond confesses in “Nothing Gonna Change.” “I’m a bad boy/ a really really bad boy/ Try if you want/ ‘cause nothing’s going to change me,” the background chorus chants in between such explanations as, “I’m always in love/ love seems to find me wherever I go.” It’s followed, fittingly, by “I’d Give Anything,” a classic “ain’t too proud to beg” Hammond regret song. Then again, “Sorry Mi Brethrens” find Hammond being a good boy, just saying no to his buddies: “I can’t leave paradise tonight.” But Hammond’s truest love is music. I never enjoyed anything in this world like making a song,” he says. “Trust me. I never enjoy a woman like I enjoy making a song. If I don’t go to the studio for a day, something’s wrong. It’s a habit I don’t think I want to quit, and, to be honest, it’s the happiest time of my life.” Yet, he spent the first ten years or so of his career suffering through more false starts than a springtime yearling race. Over and over, Hammond came within a hair’s breadth of stardom, and each time, music business injustices led him to withdraw. He sang leads for Zap Pow, Jamaica’s top backing band of the mid-70’s, when they recorded 1975’s Zap Pow Now. Bu the label focussed on other acts, UK band Steel Pulse and a young singer named Bob Marley. Three years later, Hammond’s debut solo LP, Soul Reggae, kicked off a series of chart dominating singles, beginning with “One Step Ahead,” the number one tune on Jamaican charts for four months. Another album “sold like the rest of them” says Hammond, “But no money still.” In 1985, he switched from soul to hardcore reggae and came out with the year’s number one boomshot, “What One Dance Can Do.” It was followed by other international reggae sensations, like “Groovy Little Thing” and “She Loves Me Now”. Hammond formed his own label, Harmony House, and released even more number ones, among them “Standing In The Way,” “double Trouble,” and “Putting Up Resistance.” After this, he lay low again, this time for three years, then returned in 1998 with “Tempted To Touch.” It sparked off a chain of Hammond musical explosions that’s yet to be broken. This latest set finds Hammond in a singularly philosophical mood. As good as his luv gets, he’s just as masterful when it comes to giving inspiration. “I found myself singing mostly about life, the ups and downs,” he says. I don’t know why, but I tend to go along with life as it comes. So it’s he usual Beres, Beres just lives.” “Victory” is a gem of reggae resolve, the kind of self-talk that helps listeners to keep on trodding over life’s potholes. Victory is one of my daily routines,” says Hammond. “It has to do with everyday living, the rough things you have to go through.” Let’s Face It,” a passionate plea for social sanity ad human kindness, would have been done Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On masterwork proud. The title track find Beres resolving to fight for justice, his conciliatory singing tones revealing his hurt yet making his determination, like a velvet glove hiding an iron fist. In short, A Day In A Life’s 16 tracks give this complex, brilliant, and exceptionally versatile artist room to stretch out and express himself, to move back and forth between grade AA booty-knocking background selections and equally blood-heating pleas for a better world, one ruled by One Love.