POP MUSIC REVIEW : Burning Spear Weaves Captivating Rhythms in Reggae

The reggae world certainly seems to run by its own clock. The less appealing aspects of “island time” were made manifest Monday in the seemingly interminable wait for Jamaica’s Burning Spear to take the stage at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano (not to mention the night before, when a “superfest” to have featured other reggae musicians had to be canceled at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim: 90 minutes after curtain time, the stars still hadn’t shown up ).

Still, the 15-song set that Spear ultimately delivered was a persuasive argument for a life style that recognizes no human timepiece.

Since emerging in the early ‘70s, Spear, a.k.a. Winston Rodney, has remained the most roots-based reggae artist to find an international audience. And true to his rural grounding, the music he performed seemed to draw its pulse from a steady pounding of surf or the cycle of sun and stars.

To one who doesn’t like moving to music, Burning Spear could be numbingly dull. The dramatic construction, virtuoso flash or even the basic verse/chorus/bridge variations common to Western pop music were all but missing from the songs. But for those overspilling the club’s two small dance floors, Rodney and his nine-piece band provided a captivating rhythmic weave.

Though it opened with a stereo swirl of synthesizer sounds, and though the drummer relied largely on an electronic kit, the performance was scarcely less roots-oriented than Spear’s debut album in 1974. As guitars and keyboard locked into a serious mesh, the traditionally sightly-out-of-tune horns added warmth with simple lines, and the bass laid down grooves as deep as the Marianas Trench.

While one of the first to extol Marcus Garvey and Rastafarianism in song, Rodney was little prone to the rote Jah-in-the-box slogans overworked by so many reggae artists. Indeed, most of his lyrics might have carried little discernible import if divorced from his singing.

But in the grip of Rodney’s singular voice--grainy, incantational and imbued with a weathered dignity--his simple visions of a beatific wilderness and a unified mankind became spellbindingly evocative. Even when slurred by his vocal rhythm or muddied by the sound mix, the words reached out.

A couple of the more recent songs, such as the poppish “Woman, I Love You,” seemed too light and trivial for Rodney’s biblical-quality voice, but the percolating “Queen of the Mountain” stood well beside his classic “Slavery Days” and “Red, Gold and Green.”

While more enlivened than most groups on the Los Angeles scene, the opening Bonedaddys still have a long ways to go before their “World Beat” is the equal of the Third World music that inspires them.

Frontman singer Kevin (Honey) Williams and the seven-piece band combine elements of African juju, highlife and jit music with Caribbean and other far-flung sounds and often arrived at an effective blend Monday, particularly on the kicking funk-rap blend “Yes They Do.”

But the group still impresses more as a slightly inspired college party band than as a true confluence of the very deep rivers from which it is drawing.