Audio By Carbonatix
Quick, name one of the longest-running bands in the known universe of Jamaican music. A band that started out when calypso still dominated the island; was there when the bright beat of a guitar first cried “ska”; helped slow ska down to rock steady, and then reggae; and today pumps out the booty-shaking sound of soca.
Only Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, whom a twenty-year-old Lee first formed in 1956 as a big-band answer to the extremely popular calypso singer Harry Belafonte, have been around for so long. And despite the mop of hair on his head having receded and aged from black to a grandfatherly gray, he’s maintained the same large-ensemble format (though Lee’s the only original member left), the same impeccable showmanship, and the same adaptability toward the latest trends. The group is as relevant to Jamaica’s contemporary music scene as it was in the late Fifties.
But there’s more than longevity to Lee’s story; he likes to cite his mixed heritage as a foundation of his success. “From my mother, who was of African descent, I received the soul, rhythm, and love of music,” he states several times on his Website (www.byronleemusic.com). “And from my father, who was Chinese, I received my shrewd business sense,” which helped him establish Lee Enterprises, a concert booking and promotion agency, in the early Sixties; and purchase the famed West Indies Recording Limited (WIRL) in 1968, which has since been renamed Dynamic Sounds.
What started out as impromptu jam sessions between bandleader and bassist Lee and his soccer teammates soon led to a recording contract with WIRL in 1959 and a hit song that same year with the calypso-inspired “Dumplings.” After Jamaica was given its independence by England in 1962, he was approached by the island’s minister of information and welfare (and later prime minister) Edward Seaga. “Mr. Seaga called me and said ‘Byron, you are representative of what the country likes. We must have our own music. You’ve got to go down [to Kingston’s ghetto] and bring back a music,'” he says from his home in Kingston. “So he sent me down to his area where naturally was his constituency, and there’s this music called ska being played in the ghettos. And there were people uptown who could afford to buy the records who were not exposed to it. So I took it and brought it uptown.” Byron Lee and the Dragonaires began building an international audience with the release of the 1963 multi-artist compilation Jamaican Ska and the 1966 album Jump Up on the American label Atlantic Records.
As the world became exposed to ska, Lee became the face and voice of Jamaica. Remember the James Bond film Dr. No? That’s Lee and the Dragonaires in the bar scene, playing the song “Jump Up.” Two years later in 1964 he caused a sensation when he represented his native country alongside Prince Buster, Peter Tosh, and Eric Morris at the World’s Fair in New York (when World’s Fairs still meant something). Over the years singers like Jimmy Cliff and Dennis Brown have fronted the group at the beginning of their careers.
As reggae faded in the early Eighties and dancehall took its place, Lee went back to his calypso roots with the emerging sound of soca. “Calypso is fast and now they slowed it down with soca,” he says of its ongoing evolution. “I brought ska uptown. Soca in Jamaica was uptown and I brought it downtown. I took it and made it popular in Jamaica.” The long-running ensemble accomplished this over the last decade with its covers of classic tunes like “Tiney Winey,” “Sugar Boom Boom,” and “Hot Hot Hot.” Which is why Lee considers his band to be more pan-Caribbean than merely Jamaican. Not to mention the fact that he’s traveled to Trinidad so much for the last 28 years that some people regard him as a Trinidadian.
To prove his point Lee says the current Dragonaires singers hail from Guyana (Jomo Primo), Tobago (Oscar Benjamin), Trinidad (Roger George), and the Bahamas (Cedric Poitier), besides its seven Jamaican backing musicians. He also talks up the youthfulness of the new vocalists — all of whom are in their twenties and thirties — a conscious decision to make sure young audiences can identify with the group. The fledgling members also help keep things sounding fresh and new: It’s in their raps and shout-outs, hip-swirling dance moves, and soca stylings incorporated from groups like Blue Ventures (Oscar Benjamin) and Xtatic (Roger George).
“Dancehall and reggae and soca and calypso and Latin and hip-hop, there’s a marriage between them. In the olden days, you had to play soca all night, or reggae. Now the young kids dance to everything. But we still don’t go fully hip-hop or such, we mix it back so it always has that Caribbean feel, that soca flavor,” says Lee, who credits BET and MTV for expanding his audiences’ tastes. But he adds, “The days when we used to do soca fully are now gone.”
