RIP Desmond Dekker

[King Bob]

Obit from NY Times:

Desmond Dekker, the Jamaican singer whose 1969 hit, "The Israelites," opened up a worldwide audience for reggae, died on Wednesday. He was 64.

He died after collapsing from a heart attack at his home in Surrey, England, his manager, Delroy Williams, told Reuters.

"The Israelites" was the peak of Mr. Dekker's extensive career, selling more than a million copies worldwide. He was already a major star in Jamaica and well known in Britain. The song was his only United States hit, but it was a turning point for Jamaican music among international listeners.

The Jamaican rhythm of ska had already generated hits in the United States, notably Millie Small's 1964 hit, "My Boy Lollipop." But that song was treated as a novelty. "The Israelites," with its biblical imagery of suffering and redemption, showed the world reggae's combination of danceable rhythm and serious, sometimes spiritual intentions.

Mr. Dekker was named Desmond Adolphus Dacres when he was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1941. As a teenager he worked in a welding shop alongside Bob Marley and auditioned unsuccessfully for various producers until Mr. Marley encouraged him to try out for his own first producer, Leslie Kong.

Mr. Kong produced Mr. Dekker's first single, "Honour Thy Father and Mother," in 1963, and it reached No. 1 in Jamaica. Like many of Mr. Dekker's songs, it carried a message. A string of Jamaican hits followed, including "It Pays," "Sinners Come Home" and "Labour for Learning." Mr. Dekker had a total of 20 No. 1 hits in Jamaica.

A series of songs including "Rude Boy Train" and "Rudie Got Soul" made Mr. Dekker a hero of Jamaica's rough urban "rude boy" culture.

His 1960's songs used the upbeat ska rhythm, a precursor to reggae also known as bluebeat. By the end of the decade, Mr. Dekker had won the Golden Trophy award, presented annually to Jamaica's top singer, five times and was known as the King of Bluebeat. He won the Jamaican Song Festival in 1968 with "Intensified."

"Honour Thy Father and Mother" was released in Britain in 1964 on Chris Blackwell's Island label, which would later release Bob Marley's albums. Three years later, Mr. Dekker had his first British Top 20 hit with "007 (Shanty Town)," a tale of rude-boy ghetto violence — "Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail" — sung in a thick patois, which Americans would hear later as part of the soundtrack to the film "The Harder They Come" in 1972. Paul McCartney slipped Mr. Dekker's first name into the lyrics to the Beatles' ska song, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," on "The Beatles" (also known as the White Album) in 1968, the year Mr. Dekker moved to England.

With "The Israelites," released in Jamaica in December 1968, Mr. Dekker had an international impact. "I was telling people not to give up as things will get better," he said in a interview last year for the Set the Tone 67 Web site.

"The Israelites" reached No. 1 in Britain and No. 9 in the United States in 1969. The song would return to the British charts in 1975 and was reissued as a single after being used in a commercial for Maxell recording tape in 1990.

Although Mr. Dekker had no further hits in the United States, he continued to have hits in England with "It Mek" in 1969 and the first recording of Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It if You Really Want" in 1970. But while Mr. Dekker kept up a busy performing career, the death of Mr. Kong in 1971 ended his streak of hits. He returned to the British charts with "Sing a Little Song" in 1975.

The punk era of the late 1970's brought with it an English revival of ska by groups like Madness and the Specials. Mr. Dekker's songs were rediscovered, and he was signed by Madness's label, Stiff Records. His 1980 album, "Black and Dekker," featured members of a venerable Jamaican band, the Pioneers, and Graham Parker's band, the Rumour. The British hitmaker Robert Palmer produced Mr. Dekker's next album, "Compass Point," in 1981. But in 1984 Mr. Dekker declared bankruptcy, blaming his former manager.

In 1993, the Specials reunited and backed up Mr. Dekker on the album "King of Kings," with remakes of ska hits. In 2000 he released the album "Halfway to Paradise." He continued to tour regularly; his final concert was on May 11 at Leeds University.

Mr. Dekker was divorced and is survived by a son and daughter.

[Drunk Monk]

One of my favorite misheard lyrics by Tara was "lizardy lights" for "the israelite"

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I'm working for.
Poor me, Israelite,
I look a-down and out, sir.

Hamza passed on too. I have a very clear memory of him sitting in with the Rhythm Devils @ HJK. Everyone thought it was Olatunji, which both amused and offended me. That was an event show, like NYE, and he wove a spell of the desert that will always be part of me.

Hamza El Din, 76; Musician Popularized North Africa's Ancient Traditional Songs
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
May 30, 2006

Hamza El Din, considered the father of Nubian music who helped expose the sounds of his North African homeland to a worldwide audience, has died. He was 76.

El Din died May 22 at a hospital in Berkeley of complications from a gallbladder infection.

A composer and master of the oud, El Din became known to American audiences in the mid-1960s when he performed at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded two albums for the Vanguard label.

His music drew the attention of such musicians as folk singer Joan Baez, the classical Kronos Quartet and the rock band the Grateful Dead. He collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on the album "Pieces of Africa," and played with the Grateful Dead during its show at the Great Pyramids at Giza in 1978.

Other collaborations followed, including one with director Peter Sellars for a version of the Aeschylus play "The Persians" at the Salzburg Festival. Hamza's compositions also were performed by several ballet companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet and San Francisco Ballet.

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart called El Din's music "mesmerizing, hypnotic and trance-like."

"Hamza taught me about the romancing of the drum," Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle. "His music was very subtle and multilayered."

El Din, who taught ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Ohio University and University of Texas, lived for a time in Japan to study the biwa, a Japanese lute.

Born in 1929 in the former Nubian town of Wadi Halfa in northern Sudan, El Din was an electrical engineering student at what is now the University of Cairo when he took up the oud, an instrument similar to the lute, and the tar, a single-skinned frame drum from the Upper Nile.

At the news that his homeland would be part of the area to be flooded by Lake Nasser on the completion of the Aswan High Dam, El Din quit his engineering studies and traveled the region by donkey to warn his people of the dislocation that would come about from the dam project.

He also acquired material for many of his songs. He wrote about love, childhood memories, a wedding and the water wheel in his home village.

By playing the oud, not a traditional Nubian instrument, he found ways to expand the boundaries of his native music.

He returned to Cairo to study Arabic music and later studied classical guitar and Western music in Rome at the Academy of Santa Cecilia.

Since the late 1960s, he has lived much of the time in the Bay Area and toured extensively. He offered quietly intense solo concerts and appeared at major festivals throughout the world. He performed dressed in white robes and wore a white turban.

Critics say his most significant recordings were "Escalay: The Water Wheel," released in 1971, and "Eclipse," a 1982 release. His most recent album, "A Wish," was released in 1999.

El Din's survivors include his wife, Nadra.
http://www.hamzaeldin.com/

Also we lost Ramrod of the Grateful Dead. I didn't know him well, but I partied with him at a few aftershows when I worked for the Dead. He was an interesting character, that's for sure. Anyone who earns a Hunter Elegy was.

Elegy for Ramrod

Most never knew his given name.
They called him Ramrod.
Lawrence didn't fit him.
He came down from Oregon,
Prankster sidekick of Cassady,
Kesey and the merry crew,
a silent stoic in a vocable milieu
his heart was stolen by the Grateful Dead.

A country boy, not given to complexity,
his crowning gift was loyalty
for which he was loved more than
the common run of men by friends.
This is not to say more than was so,
the common fault of eulogies
which shine the silver of modest virtue
into the gold of rareness.

Every soul owes life a death.
Between each heartbeat is a moment
within which the pulse is still.
In the longer beat between life and death
a man was here we called a friend,
a father, a husband and a son.
He is us and we are him,
his death is ours, our lives are his.

Some see Heaven as dying's recompense,
some acknowledge only nothingness
in a space we know not of,
in a place we know not where.
But this we know, as a poet said:
"To have been here but the once
Never can be undone."

Some will pray, some just remember.
Those who pray, having prayed,
will go on to pray for others.
Those who remember,
having remembered for awhile,
will in the course of time forget,
more so as the years dissolve.
This is as it should be
lest death overstep its bounds
and impinge too much on life.
Life, being what is, cannot
impinge too much on death.

The circumstance we most desire
in grief which shakes our branches
like some holy hurricane raging
through this barren world of little light,
is that our brother be gathered in glory.
If so, rejoice! If wishful thinking,
give thanks instead
that he was here among us.
Delivered from the testing fire of pain,
a truer heart was never broken.

- Robert Hunter, May 17, 2006