Love, heart and soul

DARA E HEALY

“Who knows? Maybe it’s my father knocking at my heart from the other side telling me to fuse the genres, because I keep coming back to this beautiful sound, this beautiful fusion. So, I don’t think I’m trying to create anything. I think its naturally flowing.”

– Marge Blackman on her latest release Stars Align

I HUM Marge Blackman’s Be constantly. For me, it is the ultimate expression of jamoo – uplifting music that celebrates life, positivity and possibilities. It is also a song about love – love of self and community. “Be love to all that comes your way/I'm here to encourage you to be the best/Be brave and know it's just a test.” In Stars Align, Marge continues to tell a story of love, this time set against a distinct fusion of soca and jamoo, both genres created by her father Garfield Blackman, Ras Shorty I.

In fusing soca and jamoo, Stars Align draws from the journey of Ras Shorty I as he struggled with his purpose and the direction in which he wanted to take his creativity. In the 1970s, Shorty created soca to “bring East Indians and Africans together.” He referred to it as the "soul of calypso" because he saw it as a deepening of the calypso experience. It was “a combination of the two main rhythmic structures” expressed through the drum set, guitar, synthesiser, later including the beautiful sound of the pan.

There was a similar process with jamoo. For Shorty, soca had lost its depth and ideological groundings. So once again, he pivoted. “What we are doing today is called jamoo, Jehovah’s music. The soul of calypso is now blessed with the spirit of God in the music, that is, born-again soca.”

Now, more than 50 years later, Marge is flowing with what she refers to as an ancestral call to develop this music. I think it is part of her ideology of love, so urgently needed in a world consumed by capitalist values. As she tells me, “My father for sure really wanted me to blend these two genres so what better way to do that than to write a love song.”

As with her father before her, the journey towards this song was filled with a great deal of self-reflection. Marge admits to being very tired, as artists sometimes get. I certainly understand the depths of such fatigue, when it feels as though your words, your dance and your art are being spit on and sucked into the vortex of noise, aggression and ugliness. You wonder, "why create" when a grieving grandmother can be driven to take her own life after being shamed on social media over the accidental death of her grandchild.

Still, thanks to the encouragement of Kes, Marge decided to lend her powerful voice to the Carnival space. “It’s crazy, but you’ve been on my mind almost daily/Don’t want us wondering in the maybe/So come and meet me at the junction baby/To tell me it’s not all in my head/I really do believe that we’re lead/Don’t want to feel I’m losing my mind/I know the Divine gave us a sign/They told me that the Stars Align...So jump up, get ready to jump up, fling it up like you won’t stop, this is how we does free up yeah, so jump up, get ready to feel so alive, under the Carnival skies.”

I think about this song against the reality of decreasing financial support for culture and persistent use of the law to squash creativity. The times are reminiscent of when calypso and other forms of expression were controlled to prevent ideas that were considered “hostile to the ideology of Empire” from being disseminated to the population.

Artists get tired, but ultimately we are called to fulfil the higher purpose of our art. It is this purpose that pushed Ras Shorty I and it is the force that pushes Marge today. “It is my desire to know what it is to truly be in love with our culture. What better way than to write a love story about two lovers under the Carnival skies. I feel like soca and jamoo are two hearts, two souls coming together.”

Thank you for the music, Marge and for reminding us that our culture will always renew itself to defend and guide us when we need it the most.

Dara E Healy is a performing artist and founder of the Idakeda Group, a cultural organisation dedicated to empowering communities through the arts