Jamaica Music Museum Director Herbie Miller is one of the world’s greatest advocates for iconic Jamaican trombonist Don Drummond. On February 21st, as part of the Museum’s Grounation series on Drummond, Miller brought four leading trombonists and broadcaster Dermot Hussey to a standing room only crowd at the Institute of Jamaica to discuss and celebrate the late musician’s legacy.

Significantly, one of the panelists is among the world’s principal exponents of the trombone over the last four decades, Steve Turre. Turre’s achievements stand at the top of his art form. He is a respected and innovative recording artist and member of the faculty at Juilliard in New York City. His colleague Delfeayo Marsalis is a highly accomplished producer if a less prolific recording artist. (If the Marsalis name is familiar, it’s because the family is American jazz royalty in the modern era, his more famous brothers Wynton and Branford having experienced great mainstream acclaim internationally.)

Also on the panel and the bandstand were Fab Five trombonist Romeo Gray, a Jamaican who grew up in the slipstream of the Drummond legend, and current Skatalites trombonist, the American Andrae Murchison. The ‘dean of Jamaican radio broadcasting,’ XM Radio host Dermot Hussey moderated the forum. (Mr. Hussey famously produced an enduring 1969 memorial broadcast for Drummond.)

When Don Drummond was placed in Bellevue hospital in 1965 after the infamous murder of his girlfriend Margarita Mahfood, he was the central figure in Jamaican music. He stood at the pinnacle of self-styled originality and technical prowess at a key moment in the country’s history. He had begun to garner some critical interest abroad, but his self-destruction removed him from what could have been broader acclaim, leaving nearly everything to speculation.

Fifty years later, where does he stand in the broader world of instrumental greats, jazz, and popular music? While enthusiastic Jamaicans and fans abroad love to think of him in superlative terms, a Usain Bolt to the Bone, Drummond’s role within an emerging new music scene (ska) puts him in unique territory. While American jazz in the late 1950s was at a creative plateau and on the verge of a revolution in rhythmic and harmonic structure (free jazz), Jamaica was about to bring its own popular music and international cultural expressions into focus for the first time.

Fortunately, the panel didn’t attempt to place Drummond in some kind of subjective ranking order of greatest trombonists of all time, but instead made the case that his creativity and expression of his personal identity through music were a kind of ideal blend of cultural relevance and soulful transparency.

During the two-hour discussion, each of the panel musicians related how and when they first heard Drummond and why he impacted them. Most interestingly, Delfeayo Marsalis recalled a Jamaican gypsy cab driver in New York in the 80s, who, having noticed that Marsalis was carrying a trombone case, declared to him, “you must know the greatest trombonist who ever lived, Don Drummond?” Marsalis’s incredulous and sarcastic response was, “no, in fact I don’t know the greatest trombonist ever, Don Drummond.” But the driver persisted, relating an apocryphal anecdote that Drummond was so great that jazz titan J.J. Johnson had travelled to Jamaica to hear him. The name-checking of Johnson stuck with Marsalis as the garrulous driver took Delfeayo Marsalis to the home of his brother Branford. Delfeayo related the experience to his brother and was surprised to find that Branford had no fewer than four Skatalites LPs in his collection.

“There are so many aspects of Drummond’s music that are important,” explained Marsalis to the eager audience. “First, the political aspect. He was aware of what was going on, and there’s a lot of information that he provided that shaped his generation’s need for expression. It’s not everyone who can do that. Many people can master an instrument, but to capture what’s going on in society at the time through music is very difficult, and when you don’t have words, it’s even more difficult.”

Among Marsalis’s most interesting insights was the straight line he drew from Drummond to the King of Reggae himself, Bob Marley. Once, while preparing for a Monty Alexander session recording, as Marsalis studied “Crazy Baldheads,” he noticed immediately that the melody was a major to minor key adaptation of Drummond’s “Eastern Standard Time.” This underscores Drummond’s ongoing relevance, if only through his influence on the most popular reggae artist of all time.

Years later, sitting in with the Skatalites, Marsalis learned to appreciate the rhythmic nuances of Jamaica in the same sense as that of his native New Orleans. “The rhythm is extremely important. ‘Reload,’ for example, the melody fits inside the rhythm so well. The cats are playing a shuffle … I played with the original Skatalites once, and I had to call my daddy [Ellis Marsalis] and say, ‘this is like being in New Orleans.’ Because, we know, you can learn to play the Second Line [a traditional music form in New Orleans], but if you’re not from there, you can’t really play it. It was the same thing with [The Skatalites], when they played that beat, it was so strong. It was like being in heaven. I just hugged them and said, ‘thank you for allowing me to participate in this.'”

During the discussion, Marsalis also made a key contextual distinction between Drummond’s role and influence in Jamaican music and the role of trombonists like J.J. Johnson or Curtis Fuller within jazz. “I can’t think of a composition by a trombonist that’s in the standard jazz canon, [where] if you go to a jam session, all the cats are going to know it . . . J.J. Johnson used the trombone as a vehicle for the music. Don Drummond used the music as a vehicle for the trombone.”

The musicians on the panel each played brief passages to highlight key aspects of Drummond’s body of work. Marsalis also used Bach’s Minuet in G Major as an example of the ideal structural logic of music composition. He then demonstrated how Drummond’s music followed a similarly beautiful logic, breaking down the sections of “Reload” through its bridge and resolution.

“Drummond is what we call a hopeless romantic,” Marsalis explained. “With J.J. Johnson, when you listen to his solo, you learn about his mastery of the instrument. When you listen to a Don Drummond solo, you learn something important about him [as a person]. It’s what we all aspire to. As Thelonious Monk said, ‘the genius is the man most like himself.’ We [as musicians] try to let you as the audience know who we are. Drummond let you know [who he was] with sterling clarity.”

Steve Turre recalled being introduced to Drummond’s music via Herbie Miller, when Turre played the Blue Monk club in Kingston in the early 1980s. Andrae Murchison recalled being given a well worn CD by a college friend, so well worn in fact that only one track would play, but that was enough to start the journey. As a Jamaican, Romeo Gray grew up with Drummond still in the island’s collective soundtrack.

Turre explained his admiration of Drummond’s songwriting prowess: “To me he was a master of melody. The melodies just made you feel good – sound, tone quality, and voice.” Turre played an excerpt from Drummond’s “Green Island” very literally as performed by Drummond, then reinterpreted it in a “Duke Ellington style,” with a plunger mute to make the song talk in the manner of Ellington’s trombonist “Tricky Sam” Nanton. Then he played the “Green Island” melody with the rhythmic articulation of bebop jazz. His point in so doing was that a good melody can be played in any style and still sound magical, and Drummond was the author of compositions of enduring intrigue. “To me, Drummond is not only a master of the trombone and Jamaican music, he’s a master of music.”

Andrae Murchison chose “Feeling Fine” as the song he related to most profoundly. “‘Feeling Fine’ really touched me, that tune has the chord progressions of some old church hymns that I grew up with in Savannah, Georgia.”

During the two-hour conversation, the panel also discussed aspects of Drummond’s presumed (yet not fully understood) mental illness, his intensity as a musician, the aesthetics of his approach, and other details.

As is known to happen from time to time in Jamaica, the event drew some unplanned participants. The most welcome of these was from 83-year-old trumpeter Edward “Tan Tan” Thornton, who joined the conversation to discuss his memories of playing with Drummond at Alpha Boys School, where he recalled Drummond also playing the french horn, notable because it alone rivals the trombone as the most difficult of brass instruments to master.

Each of the panel musicians brought arrangements of Drummond’s work, specifically written for a trombone quartet format. After an intermission to set the stage, the four musicians performed arrangements of eight Drummond compositions and were joined variously by Desi Jones, Ozone, Carlton Jarrett, Andrew Christian, Derek Hinds, Michael “Bami” Rose, Vivian Scott, Sparrow Martin, Nicholas Laraque, Steve Gardiner, and Tan Tan Thornton. The performance lasted nearly 90 minutes.

While the performance started off loose with Turre’s arrangements of “Smiling” and “Occupation,” followed by Murchison arrangements of “Cool Smoke” and “Man In The Street,” it gathered strength through an inventive Marsalis arrangement of “Eastern Standard Time” and was seemingly at climax when they reached the storming choruses of “Confucius,” with Desi Jones providing a ska-burru foundation in the tradition of the late Lloyd Knibb. Tan Tan joined the stage for “Reload,” soloing with forceful authority, as did Bami Rose. The highlight was arguably the performance of “Silver Dollar,” which featured a boastful duel between Turre and Murchison that brought the crowd to its feet. The evening ended with a spontaneous performance of Louis Armstrong’s “It’s A Wonderful World.”

Congratulations to Herbie Miller, the Museum of Jamaican Music, and the Institute of Jamaica for bringing this high level of discourse and insight to a Kingston audience. It’s the fulfillment of what the Museum should be doing to illuminate the country’s musical legacy.

–Carter Van Pelt, February 2016

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(Thanks to Dermot Hussey and Roberto Moore for helping identify many of the participating musicians.)