Roadkill
Fri., May 30, 1997
Antone's
Thursday, June 5
Natty Dreadlock is white. He is 29 years old, and lives in Berkeley, where he also grew up. His hair is short. He does not sing, rather he plays an eight-string guitar that is both bass and guitar. He once took lessons from Joe Satriani. When he was 19, he went to Europe and made a living busking in subway stations for several years. Later, he was in the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy with Spearhead's Michael Franti. He is signed to the premiere jazz label, Blue Note, and estimates he will put 50,000 miles on his van promoting his third album for the label, Natty Dread, while spreading the name of the father, Bob Marley.
"He was just such a vibrant figure for goodwill," says Dreadlock, whose secular name is Charlie Hunter. "Spiritually, he was putting a lot of stuff out there and making a lot of waves -- and making people look at a lot of things that they had never had to look at before. Really, for middle-class America, he put a certain culture on the map."
Hard to believe, my brethren, that a non-Rastafarian has made what is perhaps the best reggae album since the father's final bow in 1981, Uprising. And yet he has. As part of Blue Note's "Cover Series," Hunter, along with alto saxman Calder Spanier, tenor saxman Kenny Brooks, and drummer Scott Amendola, has taken Marley's 1974 opus and from "Lively Up Yourself" through to "Revolution" re-interpreted it -- jazz-style. Remember, this is what the genre does best: take the songs of the masters and make them breathe.
As Hunter says, "His music comes out of that songwriting craft that came down from Motown -- the Sam Cooke, the Marvin Gaye, the Gladys Knight kind of thing. To me, a lot of his tunes rival the Beatles'; they're high-quality, crafted pop songs."
But Dreadie, how do you explain the father and his importance to your tribe's elders?
"You know what I would tell one of those guys? I would tell him [Marley's] got the songwriting abilities of a Cole Porter. He has the soul of a Lee Morgan or Hank Mobley. He has the band-leading skills of an Art Blakey and has a band assembled just as good as every one of Art Blakey's."
So Jah Seh. -- Raoul Hernandez
