Mikel Toombs: Sly & Robbie, Gregory Isaacs, Quino

Sly & Robbie (Courtesy photo)

Next week, reggae performances in town mark a return to the red, green and gold standard. Tuesday brings the exciting Virgin Islands band Midnite to Balboa Park, while on Thursday legendary Jamaican crooner Gregory Isaacs comes to play Mission Beach’s flashy and splashy Wave House.

In the midst of it all, as they’ve been for over three decades now, are drum king Sly Dunbar and bass master Robbie Shakespeare, on a first-name basis with the world as Sly & Robbie. “When Sly & Robbie are there, you know it’s going to be tight. They’re the top, the top of the game in reggae music,” said Makeda Dread, the founder and executive director of the WorldBeat Cultural Center, which hosts both the Tuesday show and the one by Midnite the night before.

Makeda should know. Thirty years ago, when she brought Peter Tosh, who’d stood astride Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer in the genre-defining Wailers, to the long-gone Roxy Theater in Pacific Beach, Sly & Robbie were there. “Then I remember them several times playing with Black Uhuru, back when Puma Jones was still alive and Michael Rose was the lead singer.” (Singer Jones died in 1990; Tosh was murdered in 1987.)

“And they’ve played with all (these) rock musicians,” Makeda added. “I think they even played with Bob Dylan.”

Sly & Robbie, who are also producers with their own label (Taxi Records) and musical posse (the Taxi Gang), haven’t limited their game-changing performances to Jamaican artists like Tosh, Black Uhuru and, yes, Gregory Isaacs. Along with reprising the Isaacs standard “Night Nurse” (”an anthem of reggae music,” Makeda said) with British rock ‘n’ soulsters Simply Red, the duo produced No Doubt (”Hey Baby” and “Underneath It All”) and backed Dylan and Mick Jagger, as well as divas Grace Jones and, as she turned to reggae in recent years, Sinead O’Connor.

Sly & Robbie also played on a song (”Caribbean Blue”) by Big Mountain, the San Diego band whose sunny ’94 version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way” broke reggae on mainstream radio.

“By the time we arrived in the studio, they were done with their part of the recording. I briefly met Sly but I have never met Robbie,” Big Mountain frontman Joaquin McWhinney, invariably known as Quino, recalled. ”It was an honor having them on my record and I wish we could have arranged more collaboration, but my label at the time was not interested in Jamaican producers.

“It’s an unfortunate reality with U.S. labels that they were at the time so focused on the immediate hit song rather than taking a gradual artistic approach to creating an enduring, successful band. We were very unhappy at the time with the direction the label was taking us and we couldn’t get them to see our vision. Looking back, I can see that to our label, which was Warner, they just were concerned with trying to cash in however they could on the reggae fad that was sweeping the world at the time.”

When that “fad” ended, Big Mountain took a turn for the worse, and to Japan; the band’s most current album is a collection of covers for the Japanese label Pony Canyon. “That might just be all she wrote,” Quino said. “We need something to get us motivated, but right now we are all playing in different bands or raising families and starting new careers.”

That something could well be Quino’s new band, Quinazo, a nine-piece that also features three other members of Big Mountain and some of San Diego’s best horn players. Quinazo will be presenting its debut album, the politically charged “La Ofrenda” (Rebel Ink), in an opening slot for Sly & Robbie and in a record-release show June 20 at the Sunset Temple Theatre (part of the Claire de Lune Coffee House) in North Park. The new CD explores Quino’s Latin and Native American heritage and offers a stark contrast to the pop-oriented Big Mountain.

“Now, his new stuff? Serious,” Makeda said of Quino. “He’s been through so much: on the top, then hit poverty, and had to really work and get serious. It took him a while to grow up. He’s been through a lot of different things and his new album is so clear. And it’s about the people and fighting injustice. So it’s not that poppy “Baby I Love Your Way,” it’s not these covers. He’s coming hard. There’s not a cover on the album.

Quino (Courtesy photo)

“He’s suffered. And that’s what reggae is,” Makeda concluded. “Reggae music is from the sufferers. If you don’t suffer, you cannot know joy. The whole universe is about these different opposites, of change, and reggae music was born out of suffering. And people in these bars now, they forget it.”

The world beat goes on: While “tight” is right for Sly & Robbie, one can expect a looser approach from King Sunny Ade & His African Beats, who also perform here Tuesday (at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach). Blending talking drums and the Hawaiian-introduced steel guitar, the Nigerian’s “Juju Music,” the title of Ade’s American debut album, beguiled listeners with its sweetly complex sounds, just as his live performances featured free-flowing, LP-breaking (this was 1982, mind you), 40-minute musical excursions. Ade and company frequently are cited as inspirations for the current crop of jam bands, in particular Phish (both Ade and Phish appear this week at the jam-friendly Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee): “I’ve often thought that the closest thing I’ve heard to it,” Phish head Trey Anastasio said of his band’s practice sessions, in a ‘95 interview with The Album Network magazine, ”is sort of a King Sunny Ade kind of thing, where each person is playing a small part to make a greater whole.”

Someday (Wednesday), Someway (acoustic): Marshall Crenshaw, who appears with his band Wednesday at Acoustic Music San Diego, also made his debut in 1982. His critically adored, power-poppy first album likewise was aptly named: “Marshall Crenshaw.” And while he never followed up on the commercial success of the hit single “Someday, Someway,” Crenshaw, who’d played John Lennon in a production “Beatlemania” and then Buddy Holly in the movie “La Bamba,” continues to craft fine songs, including the Golden Globe-nominated title tune of “Walk Hard,” the mock rockumentary starring John C. Reilly. He’s been known to rock hard on occasion, filling in on guitar for a reunion of legendary Detroit punks MC5, whose guitarist Wayne Kramer returns the favor by contributing to Crenshaw’s new album, “Jaggedland” (429 Records). A mature, reflective work, “Jaggedland” (Crenshaw explains the title represents the state of his mind) has an impressively atmospheric sound and features musical heroes such as Jim Keltner, the session drummer whose ginormous resume includes backing the Beatles, and vibraphonist/percussionist Emil Richards (the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds”).

Mikel Toombs writes about music for SDNN.

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