Touring through the “Old Country”; California and our brothers in the Left; We Na Forget (Rome); and the Nice Jazz Festival.

No matter where you go in Europe you are slapped in the face with history. Every tiny hamlet has a memorial to the soldiers who died in this war or that. You find yourself walking by ruins that date back to the time of Julius Caesar or Moses on your way to the grocery store. Just driving down the highway, crumbling castles dot the horizon. Old buildings, old gardens, old graffiti. You see ghosts of the past everywhere.

It's very different in California, which is a newer place. As Harrison sometimes mentions on stage, Californians are the people on the planet who have wandered the furthest: from Europe, from Asia, from Africa: from our origins. Many of our parents came here to the edge of the greatest expanse of sea in order to forget the past. We are at the end of the Earth in more ways than one. The people here don't always have much patience for the past. I don't think that's always a bad thing. Sometimes its hard to imagine a future when one dwells on the past.

I wonder sometimes whether Europeans ever feel oppressed by their own history: living smack dab in the middle of it as they do. No one I've ever talked to ever admitted feeling that way. I'm not too sure Europeans know their own history any better than we Americans know ours. Young people in Europe are quite modern. They don't concern themselves with which pope built this castle or who the Ottomans were allied with in the Franco-Prussian war. This year I asked a charming young Swedish girl what she knew about the famous biologist who'd been born in her town. She shrugged and made a face. She'd had to hear about him all through school, and that was it. I jokingly mentioned that he was one of the most important people in the history of science, but she just looked out the window and said she wanted to get out of that town. She told me she wanted to go to California and surf. All I could think about was all the history she was giving up.

A few days later Ben told me he'd bumped into her at a restaurant. While they were eating a stranger approached their table and said something to her in Swedish. She ignored the guy, who'd walked off muttering to himself. When Ben asked, she told him what the man had said. “He said 'Go back where you came from'”. Her family is Eritrean. In that town it was common for people to say things like that to her, she said. These terrible old ways show their grip on us, sometimes. She handled the situation with so much grace, it seemed, that I never even told her how upset I was by the story. I wanted to tell her that, while I've heard Americans say things like that a few times, especially in the South, I'd never heard those words spoken in my hometown in California. Maybe the sun and surf state was the right place for her, too. Many people in Northern California grew up fighting for civil rights. We Californians, many of whom are proud to be surf bums and old hippies, have our misconceptions and prejudices, but people remember police beatings and tear gas, and they've passed on some of these values to the younger generation, and we're better off for it, especially in the category of racism.

Certainly France, among others, has a recent tradition of social conscience. There is a certain way to eat cheese; an art of conversation; Voltaire, Sartre, Foucault; and liberty, equality, and fraternity, terms which the French use with greater care and subtlety than Americans use worlds like “freedom”. In California we would say most French people are 'conscious'. They read the paper. They seem aware about things outside their corner of the world. This summer Groundation played at a restored amphitheater carved from the side of Mount Pipet in the city of Vienne on France's Rhone river. The people that built it lived so long ago that it is difficult to imagine what they were like. They wore totally different clothes, worshiped strange gods. They probably had slaves, but they had no electricity. They had never heard of tobacco or coffee or Jesus of Nazareth. People had already lived in that region for more than half a millennium when Julius Caesar came through. For them, the Exodus and the Trojan War were already so ancient that they were nearly forgotten: the rise of the Roman Empire was the new thing.

The people of Gaul, like the Romans, loved theater and music, which they'd gotten mostly from the Greeks. I'm sure some of the people who sat in that theater in first few centuries of the milennium were vain and tyrannical, but others probably wrote things and made things that were unbelievably beautiful. Surely they loved their children. The empire encompassed a wide variety of races and ethnicities: Jews, Africans Persians, Greeks. They had problems with political corruption and environmental destruction, just like we do, and they lived under the banner of an empire that methodically conquered every city and tribe it came into contact with.

“We Na Forget (Rome)” is one of my favorite Groundation songs. It's lively, concise and really fun to perform on stage; one of the few songs on which I insist on singing background. I've always loved the historical double meaning of the lyrics. When Harrison asks whether Rome wants forgiveness, it is not just the Rome of the Caesars, but the more recent Rome of Mussolini, who invaded Ethiopia under the fascist flag, as well.

While the latter injustice is perhaps more relevant to Rastafarian history, the former was no less grave in its day. And as Harrison is aware, many Rastafarians are more knowledgeable about ancient history than a lot of college graduates in this country, and are probably just as familiar with the trials of ancient Israel as they are with the life of Haile Selassie.

But why pick on Rome? All these things happened long ago. Of course that's true. But the thing that history teaches you that is so well expressed in that song is that everything we do, everything we feel and hope for today has been done and felt and hoped for many times by disparate people and places. Every injustice of today's rulers has been perpetrated by those of the past, with all the same justifications and rhetoric. But the song, is not just a history lesson. It raises a subtle, unspoken question. It's the question of how we can end the cycle of violence and vengeance which stretches back into the endless gulf of history.

In Rwanda, years after the genocidal violence of 1994, the country was drowning in anger and pain. So many murderers, so much injustice, so many people living in fear of the war's return. The courts and prisons were flooded with accusations and counter-accusations. Rwanda's leaders made a desperate appeal for legal experts, judges and lawyers the way some would call for food or medicine. As was the case in Germany after the Second World War, a long and tortured road lay ahead for the people who'd survived. There were calls for amnesty for the thousands of accused murderers just so the country would not grind to a complete stop. Hutus accused Tutsis, Rwanda accused Burundi, anti-colonialists blamed Belgium, and Belgian soldiers blamed the U.S. And the U.N.

What should the price of forgiveness be? What is the price of peace, as another of Harrison's songs asks. In the constant tension between war and peace, there is a struggle between the need to remember and the need to forget. Like most things, there's a great metaphor for this struggle in the world of music.

If you're a reggae fan you've seen that struggle in the interplay between reggae roots and the newer styles that have come along since then. Jazz fans are just as familiar with it. Our first allegiance may be to the artists of the past who inspired us, but if we don't innovate, what's the point? If we dwell on music of the past, how can we make the new sounds that will inspire the coming generations?

No matter what kind of music you like, you can find examples of the constant blending of styles. It's usually found where two cultures meet. The Jamaican singer Winston McAnuff has a strong drive to find these kinds of new sounds. We were on a bill with him four or five times this summer. For many years he's lived in France working with local artists, blending the sounds of the accordion and other traditionally European instruments into his music. His stage show, with French band Java, is a choreographed boxing match between Winston's English lyrics, and Java's French. Winston comes on stage wearing shorts and boxing gloves. I thought it was a good metaphor for the constant give-and-take that goes on in these kinds of meetings.

One of the best experiences of this recent tour in Europe, for all of us I think, was a stop at the Nice Jazz Festival. (How was it? Nice...)This festival featured everything from the phenomenal local funk band NoJazz to San Francisco legend Sly Stone. I found myself a bit disappointed with the performance of Jimmy Cliff, who headlined the reggae stage after our show. Of course I love Jimmy Cliff, but even though I'm a traditionalist, a lover of ragtime, blues, roots and old-fashioned music, I felt that the innovative drive was lacking in the repetition of those his classic songs. I might have heard “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Wild World” a few too many times. I found myself slipping out of the crowd and heading towards the shuttle back to our hotel.

Before I got there my attention was drawn by a familiar tone in a fresh setting. What I'd heard I recognized as the signature keyboard sound of Joe Zawinul. I'm sure many of you have never heard of him, possibly for the very reason that I mention him now. He is the perfect example of a musician who works among the cracks between different styles. Originally from Vienna, Austria, he made his mark as a jazz pianist and composer with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and the band Weather Report. I'd played many of his songs, studied them. But when I got to the stage, I was completely blown away. He was performing in a restored Roman theater. The crumbling pillars and ranks of marble tiers had the pitted and lichen-covered look of old bones. The stage, floodlit, was packed. Two percussionists a full rhythm section and Joe's complex keyboard array was pulsing with energy. I was mesmerized for nearly an hour as each member of the band took a turn singing, the drummer in Senegalese, the percussionist in French, and the incomparable, hypnotizing Sabine Kabongo, famous from Zap Mama, in a language I couldn't recognize. Joe was halfway through his eighth decade of life, and was making completely new music.

African instruments, European instruments, Brazilian instruments. Languages from around the world. Electronics and wood and copper and string. There was a wave of joy emanating from that group of people like I've rarely seen. Before the song was over, Joe left the stage unceremoniously in a wheelchair, without waiting for the applause, which started a bit unsure and built to a deafening roar over several minutes. A few weeks later, it was announced that he had died of skin cancer. I imagine that I had seen one of his last precious performances, as I had with Joe Hill the previous year. To the very last ounce of his energy he was engaged in this great symbolic struggle between homage and fresh creation which is music's constant dynamic.

So, Groundation is a reggae band. But different. The lyrics might give you something new to think about, something you haven't heard before in a song. We constantly try to make it fresh, but we might get secretly stoked if you tell one of us we sound like Family Man or Don Drummond. Sometimes, if our music leaves people scratching their heads, I just blame the language barrier. I admit I was scratching my head when I read that our performance at a festival in Northern Italy was “a welcome return for this Californian group that has having growing enthusiastic agreements.” Huh? A few weeks later someone stole Harrison's guitar from the stage of a big festival outside Paris. I wonder what was going through that person's head when he did that. I imagine Harrison would forgive him for it, he might even turn it into a song...

“Diesel” Dave Chachere
Groundation

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