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Recently, I read a surprising statement somewhere (won’t say where) that Don Drummond was named to the Playboy All-Stars in 1964. This was the result of a readers’ poll that the magazine conducted annually. I was surprised, one, because I have never heard this or come across this before in my years of researching Don D., and two, because it would go against one of the major premises of my book, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonists, that a lack of recognition and acknowledgment of his talent, due to a variety of reasons that I outline in the book, contributed to his mental decline. So, I had to find out–was this true? Did I miss something this big? The answer was no.

I obtained a copy of that 1964 Playboy magazine, as well as one from 1965 in case the poll was taken in 1964 and published in 1965, and nada. Not one word about Don Drummond–not in the poll, nor in the excellent article (I was always told that Playboy had excellent articles! Ha ha) about the state of jazz that year in the U.S. and abroad. In fact, the articles give a snapshot, in a paragraph or two, of jazz worldwide and mention a few names, like Hugh Masekla, but no Jamaican at all. There is much editorial about the American jazz musicians overseas, and the jazz scene in Europe and Russia, but no Caribbean jazz is touched.

It is sad that I don’t see Don D’s name in these pages. He should have been here. He saw these lists, he saw the Downbeat articles, and it ate at him. His idols, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding are here, and those he played with when they came to Jamaica, George Shearing and Dave Brubeck, are here too. Obviously I wanted to see that my argument was correct, that Don D was never treated fairly, but more than any selfish interest like that, I wanted to see that somewhere, sometime, Don Drummond was recognized. At least while he was alive.

Here are a few pages from those articles.

Whenever I do research on the early ska musicians, the name Foggy Mullings comes up on advertisements in the Daily Gleaner over and over again, although his days as a musician pre-date ska. It got me wondering, just who was Foggy Mullings and what was his contribution to Jamaican music? Turns out, it’s pretty big, and his contribution to Jamaica itself, even bigger.

Seymour “Foggy” Mullings was pianist and was a classical jazz musician. He was a member of the PNP and served as Member of Parliament, Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Ambassador between 1969 and 2004. He died on October 9, 2013 and Former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, who served as Don Drummond’s legal counsel during his murder trial, made the following statement about Mullings:  “We have lost a genuine champion of the people and an exemplary politician who served our nation well. Seymour ‘Foggy’ Mullings was an excellent political representative who was statesman-like in his approach to Ministerial and Ambassadorial duties. He was very much a man for all seasons who ‘walked with kings but kept the common touch’.

Foggy Mullings received his own billing but frequently performed with the other jazz groups of the day, including the Wilton Gaynair All-Stars. This group featured two Alpha Boys, Wilton himself, and Don Drummond after they both had left the Eric Deans Orchestra, and it also featured female guitar legend Janet Enright.

Herbie Miller wrote the following article in the Jamaica Gleaner on October 20, 2013 with the title, “Foggy could have been great – No known recordings of late politician, musician leads to bigger loss:”

Seymour ‘Foggy’ Mullings was first and foremost a politician. For those who knew him, People’s National Party (PNP) and Jamaica Labour Party included, he is remembered not only as someone wholly devoid of spite or resentment but also, as described to the Gleaner’s Gary Spaulding, by his friend, Burchell Whiteman, as a professional and well-known jazz musician with a large measure of versatility.

His music reflected his “temperament, understated, calming and reflective personality”, Whiteman mused.

There was this certain elegance to his touch that was also quite noticeable in his demeanour. Neither in his playing nor his personality did this sophistication resemble the sort of pretentious mannerism associated with those who adopted such attitudes because they thought it increased social mobility and status.

Rather, I suspect Mullings’ qualities were associated with one who had remained true to the family ethics, social values and spiritual qualities of late rural lifestyle that produced and nurtured him.

In that regard, former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson considered him a man for all seasons who walked with kings but kept the common touch.

In other words, Foggy Mullings was not just an exceptional musician, but also a man with a distinguishing personality infused into his music.

As a politician, Seymour Mullings served in many high-profile capacities. He was a senior officer in the PNP, a member of parliament, appointed minister in various portfolios, and after retiring from politics he joined the diplomatic community as ambassador to Jamaica in Washington, DC. In these capacities, he most certainly walked with kings, and indeed queens and other prominent world leaders and personalities.

If we consider Wilton “Bra” Gaynair, Harold ‘Little G’ McNair and Don Drummond kings among Jamaican musicians, then Foggy also stood with kings on the stage.

Taddy Mowatt’s 14-year-old vibraphone student, Marjorie Whylie, with an interest in jazz, encountered Foggy Mullings at Champion House during the 1950s. She riffs on that experience: “Everyone played at Champion House; ‘Little G’ McNair, Sonny Bradshaw, Lenny (Hibbert), (Ernie) Ranglin, Don Drummond, everyone. Even at that young age I detected in Foggy’s playing a George Sharing feel. His solos moved in blocks of chords, between both hands, and when he soloed with the right hand and held chords with the left, there was no doubt he was Jamaican by the way the melody flowed with a nuanced lilt. He was very influential to my development in that direction”.

Foggy Mullings also played in the Wilton Gaynair All-Star band at the Bournemouth Club during the late 1940s.

In adding a chorus of her own, guitarist Janet Enright recalled the line-up. “Wilton on tenor saxophone, Raymond Harper, trumpet, Foggy was on piano, Cluet Johnson was the bassist and Donald Jarrett, the drummer. I remember when members of the band soloed, they were all dynamic. We were all into dynamics; Wilton, Don (Drummond), Raymond Harper and little me, but when it was Foggy’s turn, he just swayed the people and the musicians. Everyone forgot dynamics. A soft aura just flowed over everyone and stilled them. There was nothing foggy about his music, it was angelic. He was much like Errol Garner; playing from the heart to the world, to every musician, everybody loved him. Sometimes when he was finished soloing, Wilton would go over and rest his hands on his shoulder; there was nothing to be said. He was too modest to handle compliments; he would politely change the subject and segue into something else. He was that soulful”.

Describing Mullings’ ballad playing as “powerfully gentle”, Enright counted among his favorite features The Way You Look Tonight, Full Moon and Empty Arms, which also featured Don, and Polka Dots and Moonbeams.

During the 1960s, and for some time after, I occasionally encountered Foggy Mullings at jazz sessions. That he was the musician’s musician was evidenced by the way other pianists would volunteer the bench and join the audience whenever he made a rare and mostly unannounced appearance at the Tit for Tat Club, Andante, Hotel Kingston, the Surrey Tavern or later on at the Blue Monk Jazz Gallery or the Mutual Life basement. At these sessions, I have seen and heard Foggy play with such effortless confidence on velocity charged numbers that were so swinging it elicited from musician and audience ecstatic applause, spontaneous finger snapping, foot tapping, and head nodding.

Unlike many other jazz musicians of his time, Mullings avoided crowd-pleasing roulades; instea opting for nuanced fluidity to produce inventive interpretations of the song’s melody. He infected these up-tempo tunes with splendidly cogent notes that were not only logical, but also superbly intuitive. His compelling harmonies and refined imagination turned well-known tunes into renditions that obscured their identity.

Foggy was no ordinary musician, as can be heard on a half dozen tunes I recorded from my radio some three decades ago. On each song, his sense of time and measure, his beat, remained consistently intelligent and intuitively compelling.

Mullings’ approach to slow tunes is just as engaging; his ballad playing exhibits relaxing lyricism, stable pulse and subtle melodic lines that are at once thrillingly elevating and intimately evocative.

Sensitively introspective harmonies also reflect his characteristic distinguished aura and gracefully illuminate his apparent affection for romantic standards.

On Walter Gross and Jack Lawrence’s Tenderly, for example, he seems to linger on the introduction, interpreting and reinterpreting it in multiple ways — if for no other reason than its utterly delightful tunefulness before exploring harmonic possibilities that seamlessly transform and personalise this well-known romantic song made popular by Nat King Cole.

Foggy’s interpretation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s standard, The Sound of Music, benefits from a lucid empathic reading.

Foggy never departs far from the melody, but by faintly addressing its structure he added a tropical light to the song’s western European pastel hue, providing a sunny and yet cool fusion while maintaining its sense of liberation and optimism.

Mullings’ playing betrays his musical influences. The piano styling of Nat Cole, Errol Garner and Teddy Wilson flow from his fingers. Like fellow pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, he inflected infectious humour to sessions without sacrificing the cogent intensity of improvisation.

Utterly lacking a profligate attitude, for those who served with him in Parliament, Foggy was someone whose strong but understated personality was also reflected in his music; a music that portrayed the politician and musician as both statesman and gentleman, one so confident in his abilities that political audacity, personal bravado and musical showboating had no place in how he expressed himself.

While listening to my private recording, the late Harry Graham, on introducing the Leo Wilson Quartet, described its featured artiste, Foggy Mullings, as “one of the best pianists this country has so far produced”.

While there is ephemera attesting to his musical presence, it’s the nation’s loss that there is no known professional recording of Seymour ‘Foggy’ Mullings, the outstanding pianist. Although a politician of impeccable qualities, to those who encountered Foggy, the musician, it was clear he obviously took great joy in the vocation he did not pursue.

In the mid-1960s, dances like the Frug, the Watusi, the Jerk, and the Swim were all the rage, sparked a few years earlier by the dance of all dances, the Twist. To capitalize on this trend, Eddie Seaga, then minister of culture, many years before he became prime minister, hired his school friend Ronnie Nasralla to study the people at the sound system dances where ska played. Nasralla, who would go on to become an advertising executive, created that now-famous pamphlet that taught the uptown crowds, tourists, and the world at the 1964 Worlds Fair in New York how to do the ska. It was a step-by-step featuring himself and Jannette Phillips.

I was surprised when Nasralla told me he had done a photo shoot with models for Mademoiselle magazine, teaching them to do the ska, and you can find that blog post early in the Foundation Ska archives; but I was also surprised to find this booklet of those popular dances–including the Ska! Here are scans from those pages, so get your dancing shoes on and get ready for a Hullabaloo Discotheque!

Typhoon Neoguri in Japan this week had me thinking of Hurricane Charlie which swept through Kingston and Jamaica in 1951. Why? Because talking to Eddie “Tan Tan” Thornton, the great Alpha trumpeter two years ago when researching my book on Don Drummond left me with a vision so real that every time I hear of a tropical storm I am reminded of a young Don D. and a young Tan Tan caught in the middle of that ferocious hurricane that spared their lives.

Tan Tan told me his memories of the pre-ska days at the Colony Club performing with the Eric Deans Orchestra and that night that Hurricane Charlie came to pass. “Eric Deans was society. No poor people could come there. It’s just the lawyer, barrister, and tourist, mostly tourist. It’s an exclusive club. You have to have money to go in it. We used to play six nights a week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. A lot of American tourist used to come there, every night. In those days a lot of American tourist used to come. It’s the club they come to first, they go to Glass Bucket after. Eric Deans was the best band in Jamaica and we play the same music that was played in America—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Harry James, everything. The music we played is America music. There was no ska in those days. Nobody know what was ska or reggae. There was the storm in 1951 in Jamaica. We went to work at the club and we knew the storm was coming. They say, okay, there is no club tonight because the storm is coming, to go home, right? Then we were riding, coming down South Camp Road to go home and then the storm gets worse, but we were lucky, it was just coming, so he ride over to his house and I ride to Alpha.” Not wealthy enough to have phones to notify them not to venture out, both were fortunate to survive the wrath of the deadly storm that killed more than 250 people. The storm even destroyed two buildings at the Alpha Boys School and four students there died.

If you have memories of Hurricane Charlie or thoughts on this event, please comment below—would love to hear input.

The following is an excerpt from the Daily Gleaner, August 20, 1951, which gives an account of the wrath of Hurricane Charlie–pretty dramatic writing too, if I might say:

First positive information of its near arrival was the gentle west wind which blew up at about 9.15 Friday evening. Only A few minutes it blew. Then it drifted away. Fifteen minutes later the hurricane came. It hit with full fury from the very first. It pounded with sudden force unleashing all its power with one huge roar which levelled Port Royal and destroyed the Palisadoes Airport installations as it pushed its way across the leaping mountainous sea to crash through Kingston, ripping roots, uprooting giant trees, snapping steel and telegraph posts like so much matchwood. Ten minutes of such ferocity was sufficient to paralyse the city, knocking out electric and communication, blocking transportation. And while the headwinds rushed across and out of the near devastated city touching points here and there in St. Andrew to go pounding through Sp. Town and on across the countryside, the circular winds came in to throw ships off their moorings and up against the Palisadoes road and the airport runway and to complete the damage that had begun.

The hurricane reached its greatest intensity in the first forty-five minutes then kept a sustained and always dangerous strength for the next three hours. After 1.30 on Saturday morning the winds lessened appreciably but the driving rain increased the horrors of the darkened storm-lashed night and women and children huddled screaming in rain-washed wall corners, some thinking of those whom they knew to be dead, while others prayed for the dawn.

The Palisadoes Airport was levelled and such eastern Kingston and lower St. Andrew districts as Springfield, Bournemouth Gardens, Mountain View, Eden Gardens, Blown’s Town, Passmore Town, Franklin Town, Rollington Town, and Vineyard Town were so badly mauled that it appeared as though a giant hand had moved among them during the night ripping the roofs from off the houses and crumbling the weaker ones.

But all other sections of the city from east to west, below and above East Queen Street stretching north to a line passing through Cross Roads from Cockburn Pen to Mountain View Avenue and Old Hope Road there was a concentrated damage which made it impossible for comparisons to be drawn between any sections of the city.

Only in central lower St. Andrew in an area running just above Half-way Tree was damage kept to a minimum. In all other sections of the Corporate Area, few buildings escaped damage and the loss in furniture and home furnishings cannot be estimated.

Most of those dead were killed by collapsing buildings but seven were drowned on land and 16 in the harbor.

In celebration of Byron Lee’s birthday today, I devote today’s blog post to this masterful musician, businessman, marketer, and family man. Byron Lee, through ska, put Jamaica on the map. In an interview with Sheila Khouri Lee, widow of Byron, she said to me, “Byron Lee and the Dragonaires today is more than just a band, it is an institution, it is a part of our culture and a part of our heritage.” I couldn’t agree with Sheila more, and so let’s learn a little more about Byron Lee who passed away in 2008.

I will devote a chapter to Byron Lee’s strong, talented, and business-savvy wife, Sheila, in my upcoming book which is nearly complete, Songbirds: Pioneering Women in Jamaican Music, but for this post, let us read the following article was written by David Katz for the Red Bull Music Academy in March 2013:

Byron Lee was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of the Jamaican music industry. As leader of The Dragonaires, one of the island’s top show bands since the early ’60s, Lee helped build the careers of dozens of vocalists, including Jimmy Cliff, The Maytals and The Blues Busters, and was instrumental in raising the profile of ska. He later established Dynamic Sounds, then the best-equipped recording facility in the Caribbean, where excellent material was recorded by Bob Marley, The Melodians, Junior Byles and countless other Jamaican greats, as well as Paul Simon, Roberta Flack and The Rolling Stones.

As if that wasn’t enough, Lee staged Jamaican concerts with leading calypsonians and soul stars during the ’60s and ’70s, before swapping dancehall for soca in the mid-’80s, and was also instrumental in bringing Carnival celebrations to Jamaica. He received over 120 official awards for his achievements, most notably being granted the Order of Jamaica.

Yet some found Lee controversial. Many of Jamaica’s black ska originators have consistently complained that Lee appropriated their creations, angry that the Dragonaires were chosen to back the ska delegation that performed at the 1964 World’s Fair. Claims of political nepotism have been levelled, and disapproval of his penchant for MOR. Furthermore, most accounts of Jamaican music describe Lee as “Chinese” and dismiss his ability to play “authentic” Jamaican music. Similar criticism has never been directed against Mikey and Geoffrey Chung, renowned roots players of Chinese origin, nor the Hoo-Kim brothers, whose Channel One studio scored huge reggae hits in the ’70s. The Chin family of Randy’s/VP fame have also largely avoided censure.

That “Chinese” label is problematic in Lee’s case: His maternal grandmother was a woman of part-African descent, from the Jamaican village of Auchtembeddie, whose family still practiced traditional forms of African cultural expression such as Jonkunoo and Bruckins during Lee’s youth. Some point to social class as the bigger factor: Lee was definitely “uptown.” Issues of race and social class continue to be fiercely debated in Jamaica. The often privileged social status accorded minority groups with origins in Asia, Europe and the Middle East has naturally resulted in tremendous resentment, yet the complex nature of intertwined class and race elements make these issues difficult to generalise about where Jamaica is concerned.

In any case, the family moved to Kingston when Lee was eight years old and settled in the posh Mountain View Gardens district while he was still attending Mount St Joseph’s, an elite Catholic boarding school. He discovered music there through a nun’s intervention: “I used to torment the girls, so she said, ‘If you promise me that you will not hassle the girls, I will give you music lessons free,’ and that’s where I learned to play the piano. All of a sudden music became more important to me, and then, when I came to Kingston, that gave way to football.”

At St George’s College, he became a star football player, and after one successful match in 1956, Lee created an impromptu vocal group with fellow students to perform at a school victory dance. The following year, The Dragonaires officially formed with Lee as bassist and bandleader. Their recording debut, a version of Doc Bagby’s organ-and-sax instrumental, “Dumplins,” was produced by Edward Seaga at the end of the ’50s.

It was not until the Dragonaires’ appearance in the 1962 Bond film, Dr. No, that Lee felt they had made it, however. “The high point of my life was to be in the first James Bond film. I am proud of that because all the young people who watch the James Bond series can remember seeing us; it goes on forever, and the parents will tell their son or daughter, ‘I danced to that band.’”

Following the Dr. No guest spot, The Dragonaires solidified their reputation as the island’s most prominent band by staging a series of gala concerts across the island, supporting Ray Charles at the National Stadium and Ben E. King at the State Theatre. And after Seaga introduced him to ska, The Dragonaires backed many of the upcoming stars of the day. “Jimmy Cliff, Stranger & Patsy, Prince Buster, The Blues Busters, Millie Small, all these artists worked through the first couple of years of ska with us.”

I asked Lee about the charges laid against him, concerning his alleged appropriation of ska and his supposed initial dislike of the form. “Totally untrue,” he insisted. “We knew nothing about ska until Seaga sent us down there; it was being played on the western [Kingston] sound systems, but it was not played on the radio stations because they wouldn’t accept the quality: the guitars were out of tune, the records were hop, skip and jump, so when I made ‘Dumplins,’ it was the first stereo record that really got played. Ska, I helped to bring it up. I didn’t find it, nor did I originate it, but by bringing it out, we made famous, and gave the market to The Skatalites and all the people who were playing ska. Eddie Seaga was the politician whose constituency ska was in; he knew that the music need help, and he wanted to be the Minister of Culture who said, ‘I have given you a music from the ghettoes of Kingston to celebrate our sovereignity of independence.’ So in 1962, he sent us down there to study the music. Ska was always there before us, but it was sort of kept down in the ghetto. It wasn’t recognised by the people mid-town and uptown who could afford to buy it. So I took it to the people who could afford to support it.”

The music’s status was raised a notch when Atlantic Records’ founder Ahmet Ertegun visited Jamaica, aiming to launch ska in the USA. The result was ska cut for the American market and a chaotic set of live dates in New York, which inspired Lee to build Dynamic Sounds, the studio of choice of the late ’60s and early ’70s. “When my tour went to America, I saw the technical improvements; we saw how eight-track was coming, so I decided to go back and build a studio. Dynamic Sounds was the studio that had 90% of the things happening here: all the stuff when Leslie Kong was alive, Bob Marley, Toots and The Maytals, The Maytones, The Gaylads, The Melodians. We had four A&R people working as in-house production for us: Lee Perry, Bunny Lee, Tommy Cowan, who did Eric Donaldson’s ‘Cherry Oh Baby,’ and Boris Gardiner, and I used to produce with Neville Hinds, who used to co-direct and arrange. Lee Perry had tremendous talent. Out of all the producers we had worked with, his ear for a hit before it was actually recorded, he had that gift in his head. We had in-house engineers…. [and] we trained a lot of engineers too; most of the people came from nowhere, and we gave them the opportunity to learn.”

After the mid-’70s peak, when Lee played on The Maytals’ Funky Kingston album and brokered their contract with Island, rival studios like Harry J, Channel One and Joe Gibbs became more prominent, but Dynamics was never abandoned, with Bob Marley even recording “Blackman Redemption” there in 1979. However, when Jamaican music began drifting towards dancehall, Lee returned to the pan-Caribbean party music he’d promoted in the ’60s. A few years after he was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Jamaican government in 1982, he concentrated on soca almost exclusively, scoring the smash hit, “Tiny Winey” with Montserratian soca singer Hero in 1984, and later enjoying another huge success with “Bacchanal Time,” recorded in 1993 with Trinidad’s Super Blue. He went on to back most of the leading soca performers at concerts held worldwide.

In 1990, Lee brought Trinidad’s Carnival culture to Jamaica by launching the annual Jamaica Carnival. Again, only Byron Lee would have considered such a thing. Carnival is a strictly Catholic beast, and Jamaica’s culture is far more Anglican/Protestant than that of the islands in which Catholicism took hold via extended colonial domination by the French and Spanish. But as noted earlier, Lee was himself the product of a Catholic education, so perhaps the influence helped convince him Carnival would be successful in Jamaica.

Additionally, his long association with the calypso and soca scenes of Trinidad gave him firsthand experience of Carnival’s potential for bringing people together – as well as its prospective income generation. However, Jamaica’s annual Carnival event somehow ended up being aimed at the upper-class elite and foreign tourists, whereas Carnival in Trinidad has been embraced by everyone and is historically more associated with the working class than anyone else.

In Lee’s view, though, Carnival was simply part of the same cultural continuum that gave rise to calypso, soca, reggae and ska. “It’s in our blood,” he told me. “Even today, if you play soca, the people who are really reggae enthusiasts will feel good. That’s why they love Carnival so much, because in their blood and in their heart and soul is the brown bread of the African music, which is the sound of the congas and the rhythm of soca and calypso.”

Regardless of the controversies, Byron Lee’s incredible career remains unparalleled in the history of the Jamaican music industry. Through the ’90s and into the new millennium, Lee continued a grueling tour schedule, even after reaching his 70th birthday in 2005. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer the following year, and, after a partial recovery, he went back on the road, and continued performing until just a few months before his death, at the age of 73, in November 2008. The diverse manner of his involvement in music, as well as the huge number of hits he was responsible for, has left an immense legacy.