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Skatalites Ready to Take Audience Back to the Roots of Ska.
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Post-Crescent, Appleton, WI, Skatalites Ready to Take Audience Back to the Roots of Ska. >>
BY Jim Lundstrom, Post-Crescent staff writer
This is it.
This is the real thing.
The Skatalites - living legends of Jamaican music - are headlining Skappleton at Lawrence University on Saturday.
"Our slogan is 'Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae: It All Began With the Skatalites.' That's no understatement," said Ken Stewart, the band's manager and keyboard player.
Three band members from the original 1964 lineup are still performing in the nine-piece group.
Original singer Doreen Shaffer had been with the group until recently. She has been replaced by Dion Knibb, son of original drummer Lloyd Knibb.
The other originals include Lloyd Brevett on bass and Lester Sterling on alto sax.
Stewart came aboard in the late 1980s, a time when The Skatalites had moved from Jamaica to the United States.
"I met Lloyd Knibb after seeing the band in 1987," he said. "He was playing in a little reggae band in Rhode Island. I couldn't quite understand why that was."
He and Knibb became friends, and Stewart auditioned for keyboards when original keyboardist Jackie Mittoo dropped out.
"So there was an opening there and I filled it," he said. "I was in the band for a year and we only played about 10 shows, and I was kind of curious about what was going on."
Stewart couldn't believe The Skatalites weren't touring more, so he made some calls.
"I had some friends that were putting together the Bunny Wailer (Liberation) tour in 1989," he said. "The rest is history."
The Skatalites have been on the move ever since, touring and recording, along the way earning two reggae Grammy nominations in the mid 1990s.
This year's touring will complete the band's tour of the world's continents.
"There's stuff in the works for Australia, which is one of the untouched ones, and Africa," Stewart said.
The band has a tremendous reception throughout the world, Stewart said, playing to thousands from Mexico to Moscow and sharing a stage with George Clinton and the String Cheese Incident before 300,000 fans at the Fuji Rock Festival last year.
But that's not the case here, he said.
"The United States is almost a waste of time for us at this point," he said. "In the States, the music audience is so trendy that if people don't tell them to listen to the Skatalites, they're not listening."
This will, in fact, be a rare opportunity to see The Skatalites with other bands that have followed the ska beat first set down by The Skatalites.
"We're kind of avoiding that, quite frankly," Stewart said. "Ska is a dirty word amongst most promoters. Over here it got mixed up with the black-and-white, two-tone business (2Tone was a British record label from the late 1970s that specialized in new wave ska bands such as The Specials, The English Beat and others - the label's logo was a black and white design of a man in suit and porkpie hat that came to stand for racial unity. Eventually, two-tone came to represent the ska movement of the late'70s and early '80s)."
The Skatalites recently signed on to a new label, World Village Music, a division of the respected classical label Harmonia Mundi.
"That's the reason we're on a new label," Stewart said. "We're trying to touch audiences that we haven't touched before, remind reggae folks that The Skatalites are the creators of that genre as well."
Stewart said a Skatalites show is an educational process.
"Always has been," he said. "We show them ska, rock steady, reggae. We try and tie it all in and make sure the audience understands that The Skatalites originally backed Bob Marley." 05/15/03
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