Don Drummond
For those unfamiliar with Don Drummond‘s music and the story of his tragic life, it may be difficult to comprehend why, some 47 years since his death, Jamaica still mourns his passing. Indeed, why anyone other than kin should grieve at all for a man convicted of murdering his 23 year-old girlfriend is in itself a concept with which many might struggle. And while the account of the celebrated trombonist’s life up to that tragic event may go some way to explaining why this hugely gifted and troubled man remains so special and precious to so many, the most eloquent explanation is found in the music itself.
Born in Jubilee Hospital Kingston on 12th March 1932, to Doris Munroe and Uriah Drummond of Hitchen Street, Allman Town, Don grew up fatherless and quickly developed a reputation as something of a wild child. Unable to exert any control over her wayward son, his mother eventually gave up on the task and on 10th December 1943, had the boy enrolled at Kingston’s famed Alpha Boys School. Located in South Camp Road, South Central Kingston, the Catholic Church school had become the last refuge for many young, local boys from deprived backgrounds, likely to otherwise be deprived of a sound education, spiritual guidance and discipline.
The character of the troublesome Drummond perfectly fitted the Alpha profile and the tough and rigorous programme of self-improvement enforced so forcibly by the Sisters of Mercy quickly taught boys of his nature the advantages of honesty and hard work. Over the years that followed, the regime certainly seemed to benefit the youngster, who in his end of school report was described as intelligent, industrious, civil and willing, showing interest in gardening, tile manufacture, tailoring and, above all, music. And it was the teaching of music that topped the Alpha curriculum, the self-proclaimed ‘Nursery for Brass Band Music’ having long since established a tradition of nurturing young, talented musicians.
Indeed, not long after Drummond himself graduated from the school, former pupils, alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and famed trumpeter Dizzy Reece, both made their name as leading players on the European jazz scene, a future that may well have been in store from the young trombonist had fate only been kinder.
Drummond’s main instructor was native Kingstonian Reuben Delgado, a former clarinettist in the Jamaican West Indies Regiment, who placed particular emphasis on the teaching of classical music and whose exacting, daylong lessons ensuring a degree of proficiency in even the least skilled of players. Under such conditions, the youngster thrived and while he demonstrated the first signs of the musical genius that was later to blossom so gloriously, outside Alpha’s gates, Jamaica was awash with local bands, vying to satisfy a growing demand for live entertainment from both locals and visiting patrons. The thriving hotel and club scene led to the formation of a multitude of aggregations, many of whom drew upon the school’s rich vein of young, not to mention cheap, talent.
Eric Deans led such a band. Deans, who like the majority of his local contemporaries, specialised in swing and Latin music, had become renowned for taking on former Alpha boys and providing them with a grounding in the business, and when, towards the latter part of 1950, a vacancy for a trombonist arose, he naturally looked to the school for a suitable replacement. And so it was that he auditioned the enigmatic teenager who, he had been informed, possessed an extraordinary talent, a report the bandleader soon realised was suitably justified, prompting him to offer the trombonist full-time employment. On 31st October 1950, six weeks earlier than scheduled, Drummond was discharged from Alpha and duly started work with the Eric Deans Orchestra, resident band for the Colony Club in Half-Way Tree Road.
In 1954, the young man’s formidable talent finally received national recognition when he was acclaimed as Jamaica’s ‘Best Trombonist’, an award that served to enhance his growing reputation. By now he was a headline act, fronting his own combo, whilst also guesting in various local jazz bands that included ensembles led by Baba Motta, Lester Hall, Sonny Bradshaw, Vivian Hall and Kenny Williams. It was around this time he regularly performed on the same bill as a ‘rhumba’ dancer by the name of Anita Mahfood, an attractive young woman who took the more exotic sounding stage name of Marguerita. The daughter of local fish trader, Jade Mahfood, the teenage girl’s beauty and carefree spirit enraptured the serious-minded musician and soon the dancer and musician commenced what soon proved to be a deeply passionate and ultimately doomed relationship.
As the fifties drew to a close, Drummond was firmly established as one of Jamaica’s most gifted performers, admired in equal measure for his technique and versatility, proving skilled at all forms of jazz, be it be bop or swing. One of his regular accompanists, the gifted guitarist Janet Enwright, later recalled how at a concert at Kingston’s Cricket Club’s Sabina Park in 1959, celebrated jazz pianist Dave Brubeck stopped playing in awe at Drummond’s astounding improvisational skills, while also around this time George Shearing and singer Sarah Vaughn are attributed as rating the Jamaican as one of the world’s top five trombonists.
But Drummond was more than just a proficient technician ‘ his music possessed an extra quality lacking in the work of many equally gifted players: a ‘feel’ that later would be described as ‘soul’. Such was the beauty and intensity of emotion he was able to express through his music, it was not unknown for those with whom he performed to break down in tears. Yet it was a gift that came at a terrible price, for the passion that he expressed so eloquently drew upon a deep melancholia, a condition with which he was increasingly plagued as the years wore on.
In addition, for all the acclaim, his finances remained far from healthy and in a bid to improve his situation, he took on studio work from one of the enterprising new producers at the forefront of the island’s fast developing recording industry, Clement ‘Coxson’ Dodd. Dodd had previously made his name on the sound system circuit, his ‘Coxson’s Down Beat‘ rivalling the likes of ‘Tom the Great Sebastian’ and ‘Duke Reid The Trojan’ as Kingston’s most popular set.
Dodd was, by all accounts, the first to employ the trombonist for session work, although the date and details of Drummond’s earliest recorded effort to see issue are matters of some debate, with some claiming the honour belongs to Owen Gray‘s ‘On The Beach’, and others that the aptly titled instrumental ‘Don Cosmic’ was the trombonist’s inaugural effort. Whatever the case, by the dawn of the sixties he was increasingly accepting session work.
But while demand for his talent was never an issue, his delicate state of mind increasingly endangered his ability to perform, with early indications of his troubles highlighted by a telling comment in an Alpha report of April 1961 that stated he had ‘not been mentally well, but plans to continue music’. Frequent spells away from music resulted in lost income, but the support of Jamaica’s community of gigging jazz players helped ease the financial strain ‘ a benefit concert in June ’62 raising much needed income during this troubling time.
By 1963, Drummond was back on his feet, frequently recording for Dodd’s growing concern, more often that not accompanied by fellow jazzmen, such as tenor saxophonist Rolando Alphonso, bassist Cluett Johnson and guitar supremo Ernest Ranglin. He was also regularly performing with a band put together by another revered former Alpha Boy, Thomas ‘Tommy’ McCook. McCook, a sax player and flutist of some renown, who was back in Jamaica following a spell in the Bahamas. Others to feature alonsgide Drummond, Ranglin and McCook in the combo were such luminaries as trumpeter Billy Cooke, keyboard players Leslie Butler and Cecil Lloyd, bassist Lloyd Mason and drummer Carl McLeod. on drums.
Having established a reputation as Kingston’s premier jazz ensemble, the band were lured into the recording studio to cut an album’s worth of material for Coxson Dodd, the end result being ‘Jazz Jamaica From the Workshop’, an impressive collection that sounded almost a million miles away from the developing ska sound popular among the regular sound system patrons.
Indeed, until this time, McCook and many of his colleagues had been keen to distance themselves from what they deemed to be a far too simplistic and restrictive muscial style, but early in ’64, developments abroad dramatically altered such disparaging attitudes. Diminutive Jamaican songstress, Millie Small achieved what none had previously thought possible, breaking ska internationally with her smash hit, ‘My Boy Lollipop’, the success of which led to flurry of interest around the world in the exciting new sound from Jamaica.
Suddenly the prospect of performing ska was not quite such an unattractive proposition and around the spring of ’64, McCook put together what would soon become the greatest exponents of the genre. Comprising some of the finest of players on the circuit, the group’s brass section alone contained a truly dazzling array of talent, the revered sax-man lining up alongside Drummond, Alphonso, Lester ‘Ska’ Sterling on alto sax and trumpeter Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore. The remainder of the band was almost as impressive, it being comprised of Lloyd Knibb on drums, bassist Lloyd Brevett, guitarist Jerome ‘Jah Jerry’ Haines, and child prodigy, Donat Roy ‘Jackie’ Mittoo, the band’s keyboard player.
The aptly named Tommy McCook & the Skatalites made their first public performance soon after, with local record producers keen to take advantage of both their breathtaking talent and growing popularity. Heading a list of local music entrepreneurs were two men who would continue to vie for dominance in the local recording industry throughout the remainder of the sixties: Clement ‘Coxson’ Dodd and Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid.
While much of the Skatalites’ work was to provide musical accompaniment to local vocalists, the group were also given the opportunity to shine as the featured act, with ska more often than not the preferred style. In the summer of ’64 three of the band’s instrumentals rode high in the national JBC chart ‘ a version of Mongo Santamaria‘s ‘Fat Back’ (aka ‘Tear Up’) and ‘Bridge View’, both of which were produced by Dodd and accredited Roland Alphonso in the lead role, and Drummond’s own ‘Eastern Standard Time’, cut for Reid’s Treasure Isle imprint around the same time.
The remainder of the year continued in much the same vein, with the Skatalites undertaking a gruelling schedule that involved numerous live dates and regular recording sessions for an array of Kingston-based producers. Under such intense, relentless pressure something was bound to give, and as 1965 arrived, that something appeared to be Drummond’s state of mind.
The story goes that after missing a New Year’s Day gig, he had become infuriated, allegedly blaming his young girlfriend on the failure to administer his prescribed medication. Whether or not that proved to be the cause of what was to follow, we shall never know for sure, but what is certain is that around 3am on the morning of 2nd January, Mahfood returned to the flat the couple shared at 9 Rushden Road after performing at the Baby Grand Club in Cross Roads and Club Havana. There followed a dispute between the young woman and Drummond as to whether or not he had locked her out of the building, the argument resulting in the celebrated trombonist stabbing his lover to death.
Drummond always maintained his innocence and that the wounds that caused her death were self-inflicted ‘ what seemed a conceivable assertion given Mahfood’s far from conventional behaviour and apparent fascination with knives. Nonetheless, at his trial that July, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to spend an indefinite period in strict custody at Kingston’s Bellevue Hospital, an institution established to treat those deemed to be of unsound minds.
There, the trombonist spent the next four years, a period during which the Skatalites folded, the group’s rendering of the ‘Guns Of Navarone’ movie theme breached the British charts, and ska was superseded by rock steady, a style that in turn gave way to the rhythms of reggae.
On the morning of 6th May 1969, Drummond was found dead on the floor of his cell. The official verdict was death by natural causes, with a spokesmen for Bellevue stating he had been unwell for some period leading up to his passing, but many remained unconvinced, with various rumours circulating as to the true cause. Some claimed it had been heart failure, possibly brought on by malnutrition or even because of his medication, while others maintained his death was due to a severe beating from warders or a revenge killing instigated by Mahfood’s father.
Soon after Drummond’s burial outside Madden’s Funeral Chapel in North Street, on 15th May 1969, Jamaica’s Prime Minster Hugh Shearer announced that the winner of the prestigious annual Festival Song contest would in future receive the ‘Don Drummond’ award, a decision generally applauded by the Jamaican public.
One journalist in particular caught the mood of the nation at large when he wrote, ‘Don Drummond was unmistakably ours, though he was rated as one of the best trombonists in the world. We loved him unconditionally. Today he does not live in our memory as a ‘convicted murderer’. He is remembered as a very gentle man who flew away on the wings of his music, far away from the bitter reality of life he could not face. In one mad moment of madness he killed a Rhumba dancer, the woman he had loved. It was a crime of passion. We mourned with Don Drummond for the tragedy that came upon him. It was our tragedy too. We forgave him for he knew not what he had done. After the pain and the sadness of his passing, we still remember the joy of his music and wish to honour him for enriching out cultural heritage.’
Since Drummond’s passing, the tributes have come in many forms – concerts, radio broadcasts, poems, awards, seminars and conferences on his life, and of course recordings. On the tenth anniversary of his death, a Jamaican journalist eloquently wrote ‘the timeless quality of some black music is that it will not be silenced. It lives, powered by a sprit that is as fresh now as when it was created. Don Drummond’s music is that timeless’ Don D transcends and is still unsurpassed. That inner cry, which gave his trombone its unique sound, is too personal to be successfully imitated. His loneliness and its brooding blues has given him a ‘kind of sainthood’ in a contemporary culture, and much of his music was a forerunner to the upsurge in black consciousness in the late sixties’ in a eulogy ten years ago [in 1969], Bongo Jerry said, ‘Dan De Lion blew an iron that was black and blue, a Peter Pan to lost black man.’
More recently, Jamaican poet/playwright/musician/musician/professor of literature Kwame Dawes penned a dramatic biography of the celebrated trombonist in the acclaimed play, ‘The Valley Prince’, US music journalist Heather Augustyn published her acclaimed biography, ‘The Genius & Tragedy Of the World’s Greatest Trombonist’, while there have also been discussions concerning the possibilities of making a feature film of the enigmatic trombinist’s turbulent life.
LAURENCE CANE-HONEYSETT