It’s
one of those movie-like spring days in Paris, where blue skies and brilliant
sunshine lift spirits after a long, wet, grey winter. Many people are outdoors
trying to catch the rays, but Jamaican artist Danny Coxson is not among them. He’s inside a museum in a northeastern
neighbourhood of the French capital, with a brush in his hand and tubs of vivid
paint beside him, focusing on finishing a portrait of a deejay named Big Youth.
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| Artist Danny Coxson and Curator Sebastien Carayol. |
Coxson’s
artwork - colourful and precise renditions of Jamaica’s best known musicians - is the “common thread” that links the vast range of items on display in Jamaica Jamaica!, France’s first major
exhibition on the history and impact of Jamaican music.
Raised in Trench
Town, like Bob Marley, 55-year-old Coxson has been painting since he was a
young man, but he says he didn’t take it seriously until he was in his early
thirties, when he lost three fingers through a machete incident in 1991. Since
then, he has devoted his career to painting murals of Jamaica’s singers,
producers and sound engineers, holding his paintbrush in the remaining fingers
of his right hand.
Through a
grant from the Institut français cultural agency, Coxson has been artist-in-residence
in Paris since February, painting murals and portraits for the massive exhibition.
On this day, he’s an island of calm in the museum, as workers rush around,
finalizing the display for the public opening on April 4.
“This
exhibition is a good thing for us Jamaicans,” Coxson says in an interview. “But we have to
wake up about our own culture because sometimes we don’t value it enough. And
look at how people come from so far and take it up.”
Jamaican
music and artistic production have contributed greatly to the island’s cultural
and economic development, but this is sometimes overlooked, Coxson says.
Artists like him don’t receive enough official support, but perhaps the
international spotlight will lead to greater local recognition of the role the
arts play in development.
The Jamaica Jamaica! show is being held at
the Philharmonie de Paris, a cultural institution at Paris’ immense Cité de la
Musique complex. The Philharmonie focuses on music in all its forms and
comprises state-of-the-art auditoriums, exhibition spaces, and practise rooms.
It had long wanted to host an exhibition about Jamaican music, says Marion
Challier, exhibition project manager.
“But we
wanted to show the culture as well as the music and to show that Jamaican music
is an important part of the history of the Black Atlantic,” she adds.
“There are so many stereotypes about the music and so many stigmas attached and
we wanted to go beyond that.”
For the
organizers, including curator Sébastien Carayol, it was important to show the
African roots of the music and to shine a spotlight on its early forms, such as
kumina and mento, as well as on ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall. “It was
essential for us that the exhibition wasn’t just about Bob Marley,” Challier
says.
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| Photos of Bob Marley are a key part of the display. |
According to
the organizers, “The branches of Jamaican music reach as widely as those of
jazz or blues, and its roots dig deep into the days of slavery, tracing back to
traditional forms of song and dance inherited from the colonisation of the 18th
and 19th centuries.”
Still, “what
many people don’t know is that since the 1950s, inventions in Jamaican music - born out of the ‘do-it-yourself’ ingenuity pulsing through the ghettos of
Kingston - have laid the foundations for most modern-day urban musical genres,
giving rise to such fixtures of todayʼs musical lingo as ‘DJ’, ‘sound system’,
‘remix’, ‘dub’, etc.”
The
Philharmonie adds that: “Jamaican music is anything but one-dimensional. Often
placed under the heading ‘World Music’, it is so popular around the globe that
it could be called the ‘World’s Music’”.
Carayol, the
curator, says that a particular interest for him was to show the “legendary
sound systems” that have been an intrinsic part of 20th-century
Jamaican culture. The exhibition has assembled original “sound-system” speakers, or "mobile discos", dating from the 1950s and 1960s, for instance. Many of these had been
discarded, and it was thanks to collectors who “rescued” them that they can now
be displayed.
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| Coxson and Exhibition Project Manager Marion Challier. |
In fact, one
huge speaker box was being used as a bench in somebody’s yard when a collector
from the United Kingdom spotted it and managed to get it renovated, according
to Carayol. It’s currently back in working order.
These sound
systems lend themselves to the interactive nature of parts of the exhibition.
Visitors are invited, for instance, to take a stint as the “selector”, to spin records,
“turn up the volume and feel” their own sound “delivered by a world-class sound
system custom built by sonic master Paul Axis”.
In other
spaces, visitors get to learn about the famed Alpha Boys School, where orphans
or other disadvantaged youth were groomed to become musicians at an institution
run by Roman Catholic nuns in Kingston.
The School
has had its own band since the 1890s, and its alumni have influenced the
development of both ska and reggae, according to historians. The four founding
members of the Skatalites group (Tommy McCook, Don Drummond, Johnny
"Dizzy" Moore and Lester Sterling) were “Alpha boys”, and the
exhibition includes a vibrant mural of the group - painted by Coxson.
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| Musical instruments from the Skatalites. |
The School
will have tee-shirts on sale to raise funds for its continued operation,
following fears that it would have to be closed in the future.
Jamaica Jamaica! also includes paintings of
personalities often mentioned in reggae lyrics, such as Pan-African leader Marcus
Garvey and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, and visitors can listen to records
that mention these political figures.
“Through
installation, artwork, recordings, film - we’re trying to explain who everyone
is,” says Carayol.
Asked why he,
a Frenchman, was the curator of the exhibition, Carayol said the “simple”
reason was: “You spend three years writing a project and it has to be written
in French.”
Beyond that
he has the “interest and the expertise,” he said, having spent years
researching and directing films about the music. “The last thing I want is to
be an outsider looking in and telling Jamaican people about themselves. I’m
here for them to teach us and not the other way around. That’s my main focus,”
he emphasized.
The so-called
“rod of correction” used by then prime minister Manley is on display too.
Manley gained support from the island’s Rastafarian community partly by claiming
that Haile Selassie had given him this rod, or walking stick. And though that
claim was later debunked, the “rod” remains the stuff of legend.
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| Artwork by Danny Coxson at the exhibition. |
The expected 150,000
visitors probably won’t forget Coxson, as his paintings of the island’s talented musicians and of renowned Jamaican poet Louise Bennett put these personalities
resolutely centre stage.
(Photos and text - copyright AM / SWAN)
(Photos and text - copyright AM / SWAN)
"Jamaica Jamaica!" runs from April 4 to August 13, 2017. It includes a "Jamaica Weekend" with concerts, workshops and lectures. For another version of this article, please visit the Inter Press news agency site:
