Pioneer Player Upset by Rap-Style Reggae

Tommy McCook doesn’t think much of the direction reggae music has taken in the last decade or so, what with all those deejays--er, “vocalists”--rapping over prerecorded rhythm tracks.

“It’s always been a spiritual music--Bob Marley kept it spiritual--but, after Bob Marley died, the cats went wild, mon,” said McCook of pioneering Jamaican ska band the Skatalites. “Everybody got crazy about this deejay thing, U-Roy and Big Youth and Dillinger, all these guys saying, well, talking is better than singing.

“Talking took over, and it’s been that way ever since. The music should have progressed further, but because of this talking and cutting up music and rude, vulgar songs, they changed the music too much and it killed reggae.”

McCook’s dismay is understandable. Back in the middle 1960s, the Skatalites practically invented ska,

the lively, horn-heavy precursor to reggae, and were essential in the transformation of ska into reggae.

And, since their 1983 reformation, McCook and his fellow Skatalites have been at it again, hoping to take reggae back to its roots, to turn back the clock a bit. They’ll be appearing Friday night at UC San Diego’s Price Center Ballroom, along with English ska revival band Bad Manners.

“It’s not my idea to bring back ska, because I know what happened in Jamaica--Jamaica’s not into ska anymore, Jamaica’s into reggae because of Bob Marley,” McCook said. “So I don’t think it could ever be in the No. 1 spot anymore.

“But we need to get some nice things into reggae; I’m thinking of what to add to it to get it spiced up again.”

The Skatalites were one of the earliest and most important Jamaican studio bands to record ska, a hybrid of American rhythm-and-blues, Latin swing and native Jamaican mento . Ska is characterized by a 12-bar blues shuffle with accents on the second and fourth beat.

And, although the group was only together for a little more than a year, from 1964 until 1965, they left their mark through countless studio sessions in which they backed the likes of Eric Morris, the Charms, Justin Hines, the Maytals, the Wailers, and the Heptones. The Skatalites also issued instrumental records from their own sessions, scoring Jamaican hits with tunes like “Ball o’ Fire,” “Confucius” and “Dick Tracy.”

“Fourteen months, that’s all we did,” said McCook, who plays trumpet and tenor sax with the band. “But we did a lot of recording, and that kept the name of the group alive.”

During the Skatalites’ brief time together, ska evolved into rock steady, and rock steady evolved into reggae. They were not only there when it happened, they helped make it happen, McCook said.

“We went right through the three phases. We were at Treasure Isle (a Kingston recording studio), and the producer came in and said he would like the music to slow down if we could slow it down because the people who were young during the ska time got tired and wanted slower music to dance to; they couldn’t keep up with the ska anymore.

“So we slowed down the ska and called it rock steady, and he came back and said the people loved the music, so we continued in the same vein for a while. Then somebody said to slow down rock steady to reggae, and that’s how reggae came out--it couldn’t get any slower.”

Before reggae really took off, the Skatalites broke up, and its members went their separate ways.

McCook formed a new group, the Supersonics, and continued to play reggae in clubs and dance halls until the early 1970s.

“We did shows all over Jamaica, and then I just chilled out,” McCook said. “The clubs were closing down because of all the gunmen on the loose, shooting up and robbing nightclubs everywhere. People were afraid to go out at night, and the club life sort of went.

“So I just cooled out, mon, and went into recording. I was stationed at Treasure Isle, and I did free-lancing, studio work.”

In 1985, after nearly a decade and a half of free-lance session work, including jobs with Bob Marley, McCook left his native Jamaica and moved to Connecticut. He was the last ex-Skatalite to leave his homeland because there wasn’t much happening there musically for him.

McCook didn’t have to look for work. Two years earlier, the Skatalites had regrouped for the 1983 Reggae Sunsplash Festival in Montego Bay.

At the urging of the annual concert festival’s organizers, McCook and three other original members had recruited five new players for what they thought would be a one-time-only reunion performance.

“Sunsplash had requested that,” McCook said. “They needed a shot in the arm, so to speak; all they were getting was reggae, reggae, reggae, and they wanted something different.”

The show went well, and the band has been together since.

Since 1986, the Skatalites, now based in New York City, have been touring incessantly all over North America, attracting good crowds and even better reviews.

“I find here in the States right now, young people have the energy and the feel for the ska music, so they jump to the ska and they love the ska more than reggae,” McCook said. “It’s easier to dance to.”

Still, the Skatalites have yet to release a follow-up to their debut reunion album, “Return of the Big Guns,” which came out in 1984 on the Island Records label.

“We haven’t been getting any good offers,” McCook explained.

Earlier this year, McCook said, “I took it on myself and started a new album anyway. We’re on the verge of finishing it--we’re going to need a few more hours in the studio, a few more songs; we have a nice singer now and I’m going to try to let him do some songs.”

McCook expects the album to come out in 1991.

The Skatalites could probably improve their odds of securing a new label deal if they commercialized their sound--maybe by adding a deejay, or a rapper--but McCook bristles at the suggestion.

“No, no, we leave the rap thing for the rappers,” he said. “There’s too much of that going on already, and we’d rather stick to the music, because the rappers cannot play music. There’s no place for instrumentalists, and we just couldn’t do that at this stage in the game.”