Yuck-Duck-a-Daah, part two: the interior music of the trombone

Trombone music is music very much like any other form of music, surely. It is music played by trombones… And that would be only your first mistake. Be assured that there will be more to follow

Prince Far I: ‘No More War’ (Cry Tuff / Front Line)

FOR THREE DECADES after the end of the Second World War it felt as if the trombone might well be the truest, most vivid voice of Jamaican music, as essential to the expressive top layer of the music as a kickdrum thud on the three came to be its unread beating heart. Once upon a time, the island delivered up ’bone men as it also once produced terrifying fast bowlers, and no doubt it will do so again. But for the time being at least there is a moratorium on both. The production line has slowed to a stop on both fronts.

As you might expect, there are a number of explanations for this, from the usual socio-economic ones (you earn more if you play basketball in the US; you earn more if you operate a laptop anywhere else in the world) to the unusual socio-economic ones (it is in the nature of the glamour professions that their weighting shifts as society shifts, especially in a world with social media in it). It just doesn’t pay, is the aggregated answer.

So if trombonists and fast bowlers really are close to extinction in Jamaica, not only as national symbols but as species, which of the two has been the greater success in evolutionary terms? Which has delivered more greatness to that most beauteous but troubled ex-colonial island of the northern Caribbean? Fast bowler or trommie?

And that’s where you may well be surprised. Because by any analytical method you may choose to deploy, there have been more great trombonists in Jamaican history than there have been quicks of the authentically great kind.

Examples — and proof — to follow in all good time.

First we must consider what it is that allows a trombonist to be great in such an environment, and then, having done that, consider the special relationship that seems to have been nurtured so ripely between Jamaican music and the bone’s rich tenor sway.

Don Drummond was the first of these colossal figures to be born on the island, in 1934. Ideal timing if you think about it, because it ensured that the precociously mature Drummond was in position to ride Jamaica’s 1950s big band jazz and R&B wave and then alight, a fully evolved player with a distinctive soloing voice, at the stop marked “ska” in the early 1960s, the bouncing soundtrack to Jamaica’s moment of political independence.

He was arguably the most eminent member of the Skatalites, the thunderous ska orchestra of international reputation, and became a household name on the island of his birth initially because of the subtle dignity of his tone, intonation and phrasing; and finally, and then very sadly, in 1966 when he was convicted of stabbing his girlfriend to death. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1969 in prison, having been pronounced criminally insane. He never saw reggae become fully itself.

Born later the same year as Drummond but not endowed with as much charisma, Rico Rodriguez’ warm, ultra-mellifluous tone and phrasing might be taken as an inversion of his prickly nature, but I wouldn’t have advised asking him. Rico seldom merely parped as a matter of principle and his sound was always slippy, sometimes choral, usually honeyed. He lasted a lot longer than Drummond, into the second decade of this century in fact, and will have been heard by rather more people, certainly in this country, as the regular ’bone in The Specials. Rico’s The Man from Wareika is the title of a warm and super-tasty album he made for Island in the late 1970s: the trombone as subtle introjector of texture and atmos. Listen to “Ramble” and feel the island flow between your toes like fine sand.

The guy with the really big CV lives yet: Vin Gordon, born in 1949, fifteen years after the twin colossi discussed above and perhaps better served by that fact because he grew up into a world in which Jamaican music was truly Jamaican (his first gigs as a teen prodigy were with the Skatalites). Vin was in the pocket from the start: idiomatic, atmospheric, creative. Mature reggae’s greatest trommie. His CV? The Skatalites, the Upsetters (that’s him all over War Inna Babylon and Super Ape), the Wailers, Aswad (Vin again, driving ”Warrior Charge”). And it’s my belief he is the unnamed horn heard chorusing in thick reverb in the near distance behind Prince Far I on the most dignified and profoundly fierce anti-war song ever recorded. “No More War”.

“No More War” and its dub version would between them constitute Exhibit A in my case were I ever required to contend in a court of law that the only place to go for both dignity and stateliness in post-war popular music is the deep, dark roots reggae of the 1970s. There is no other place.

I bought this remarkable artefact, unheard, in the declining days of that declining decade purely on the strength of a passionate review in the pages of what I presume was NME. I am pretty sure the writer was Viv Goldman. I have that Cry Tuff single still. Somewhere. It is as deep an expression as I have heard of the Rastafarian notion of “dread”, the holy fear that binds the soul in the face of God while living in nature—the opposite place to “Babylon”.

Prince Far I aka Michael Williams was a preacher of dread puissance, as thunderous and intimidating as any Old Testament prophet you can summon to imagination. “Signor, I sorry for yuh, if yuh love war,” he sighs, traumatised by his insight. Gordon’s trombone (if it was actually Gordon — the session notes are thought to be lost) adopts the twin role of fanfare and chorus, his multi-dubbed horn descending in magnificent steps from a high place, churning with repeat echo and straight reverb, slow lightning to Far I’s volcanic roar.

The trombone raw in Nature.

Oh, and as promised, the results of my research into the great face-off: trombone vs fast bowler as measures of national purpose and identity:

Trombones 3 (Drummond, Rodriguez, Gordon), Terrifying Fast Bowlers 2 (Holding, Walsh).

Those of foolish temperament who wish to cry “Patrick Patterson” in an effort to equalize will be quietly seen off the premises with the gentle reminder that Patterson was terrifying for about three minutes and was never great. And besides, the ’bones have a sub on the bench, a finisher, who can come on and nick it in Extra Time. Step forward, the fairly great Nambo Robinson.

Richard Wagner: Overture to ‘Tannhäuser’

IF THERE IS one piece of music that made me want to play the trombone, long before I’d heard of Don Drummond or countenanced a Gabrieli canzon, it’s this, the trombone in all its unholy, savage majesty, absolutely pulverising everything in its path to an imagined Nordic glory.

I am not sure when I first heard the Overture to ‘Tannhäuser’, but it must have been before I went to secondary school because it was in the first year of secondary school that I discovered, very excitedly indeed, that the room where we were taught English contained an old record player which delivered a surprisingly punchy, room-filling sound and, with it, a small collection of dramatic recordings that included this hyperventilating Overture. I took to sneaking in there at lunchtimes to put the record on at ever-increasing levels of amplitude, already knowing which bit of it I wanted to hear and why (suggesting that I was an addict well in advance of my twelfth year). And subsequent to a two-minute blast of this overwhelming storm of orchestral weather, I would stride back out into the Sturm und Drang of the school day completely fortified. Until the fateful day came when, with my back turned to the door and with an invisible trombone held up to my face, giving it everything I’d got, I just about heard the bellowed words, “COLEMAN! What do you think you’re doing?” in the back of my mind — or was it in the room?— and froze, my mimetic slide caught like a slippery fish in third position…

Go on. Get a hit of this version by the Berliner Philharmoniker. Indulge yourself for the mere two minutes required for this edit to pass. This is the way to do it: three trombones enacting the greatest smash and drag in the Romantic canon, the drag so grossly exaggerated it brings spasms to the hands of the conductor Andris Nelson. And as the picture fades, keep looking at Nelson’s face. That is the face of a man who has just copped a full load.

Wilfred Josephs: Theme from ‘I, Claudius’

IF YOU’RE OF an age to remember this, then you are probably old enough to be allowed out on your own at night without a squad of legionaries as bodyguards, or reliable knowledge of the movements of your auntie Sian ‘Livia’ Phillips’ for most of the preceding day.

Wilfred Josphes was an admired composer for TV and this must have been his finest work, surely. I love the scoring of this stretchy-stretchy modernist theme for trombones (assuming I was right in thinking they were trombones — I can’t unfortunately bear reliable witness anymore). It’s modernist and it is also Ancient Roman, somehow. But that’s ‘bone power for you.

The Crusaders: ‘Keep That Same Old Feeling’ (Blue Thumb)

NOW HERE’S A funny thing. Despite the trombone’s in-on-the-ground-floor spot close to the origins of early jazz — you know: the New Orleans ‘tailgater’ hanging off both the beat and the back of the wagon to find room for slide action — I have never really enjoyed the trombone as a jazz instrument, especially in modern jazz, which is my preferred jazz area. Not hugely anyway. I admire JJ Johnson, Jimmy Knepper, Curtis Fuller no end but I don’t want to hear them struggling for air in the squall of bop, which is where modern jazz is really modernist. Nor am I a great appreciator of the pre-eminent sideways trombonists of the avant end of the mod-jazz continuum in the 1960s and ‘70s your Grachan Moncurs and, even more regrettably, your Roswell Rudds. They’re marvellous and all that but they never get me to the place where jazz gets me and trombones get me.

The nearest I come to that place in a fairly jazzy way is when I hear this guy, when he is at the top of his game: The Crusaders’ founding trombonist Wayne Henderson.

In this survey we have heard trombones as tone cannon, as snaky agents of noxious unease and as bringers of ennobling stateliness. How about the trombone as light-filled dancer in blue grace? No? Well, listen to this. It may not be pure improvisation (I’ll eat my mouthpiece if it is and wash it down with draughts of juice evacuated from the spit valve belonging to every trombone in the kingdom) and it might well be operating within the ultra-tight confines of a Houston blues-jazz combo slipping into the uptown funk, but this is trombone playing of the highest order at the high end of its range. He glides in at roughly 1m 40s and less than a minute later, a minute composed of delicious pirps, pwoops, fwerps and harmonic flicks (the slide flicks down as lip flips up on the harmonic: 2m 25s), you have experienced an exquisite little lesson in the instrument’s language of groove. No, it isn’t jazz, but sometimes it is not a bad thing to not be jazz.

Frank Sinatra with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra: ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ (Capitol)

IT’S THE BEST-known version of this svelte Cole Porter standard: Sinatra’s face off with Nelson Riddle’s trombone section on Songs For Swingin’ Lovers!, with ol’ Frank holding down the tune swinging-ishly, while the ’bones loiter and mock and utter curiously harmonised grunts, until Sinatra ducks into a doorway and leaves the way clear for the trombones to have a street-fight among themselves, playfully, like squealing piglets. This isn’t jazz either. It’s high-end jazz-flavoured swinging pop and it is fantastic. But don’t tell me this cut isn’t entirely about the way trombones behave when left to themselves.

Yeah, cheers, Frank! Nice one, mate. Yip, you too! See yah!

Tiburtio Massaino: ‘Canzon 13 por Otto Tromboni’

And at the last we go back to the beginning, as TS Eliot says we must. And this is what I shall expect to hear in my mind in my scuttled forest ship, as my tissue begins to mingle with the squelch in the bole of an ash and squirrels eye me suspiciously: eight slow trombones setting the tone for the Doge of Venice in the first decade of the 17^th century, a piece so radically yet evasively beautiful that it is hard to cling to as recollected sound in the mind after the echo has died at last to nothing. How can you hold eternity in the mind?

The darkness is present though. You can feel it almost as matter in the slow polyphonic uncoiling of this meandering, unfocussed processional. And then, right at the end, seconds from closure, there is an abrupt caesura and the polyphony dissipates with the echo into the vaults and, with the most solid of fat, reassuring key-centring chords you can imagine, Baroque block harmony is revealed as the consequence of all that wriggling — and you are free to let go. The trombones take the strain.

Or rather the sackbuts do. Look at the video: that’s what sackbuts look and sound like. Marvellous, aren’t they?