Skip to main content

Album of the Day: Jazz Ska Attack - Don Dummond

 

Jazz Ska Attack (1999) - Don Drummond

I learned all of this in seconds:

A track from Jazz Ska Attack pops up on my Apple radio station. The track is great, and name Don Drummond sounds familiar, so I head to Wikipedia. Ah, he's a founding member of The Skatalites--I love The Skatalites! And he stabbed his girlfriend four times in the chest, killing her. This was 1965. He's found guilty, ruled criminally insane, and imprisoned in a Jamaican asylum where he died four years later. His death may have been due to improper medication or a poor diet, but it could also have been a revenge killing at the hand of gangsters. Or it was the Jamaican government.

Oh, and there's a ballet depicting his life. And Delfeayo Marsalis wrote the foreword to his biography, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist (2013), a book that now sits in my wish-list next to People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry (2009).

Hard not to constantly think of this info dump while listening to this masterful compilation album fusing jazz improvisation with ska rhythm. I've been spinning this shit for days now. The first three tracks ("Alipanga", "Thoroughfare", and "Burning Torch") are laid-back, trombone-led jams. "Rocket Ship" includes stray lyrics (basically "Rocket Ship" and assorted noises), as well as an explosion sound effect. "Occupation" cops the horn section of "Ring of Fire" and mixes it into a dancehall bopper.

 Label: Charly Records

Track for monthly playlist: "Burning Torch"

Listen: https://music.apple.com/us/album/jazz-ska-attack-by-don-drummond/156030264
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

State of the Blog (Part 1?)

No posts since October 2024 and then four since August 24? One of these posts is a random playlist and another is review of a Conan the Barbarian eBook? What’s going on around here? What’s the point of this blog? Practice is the point. I love writing, and I never write. I love creation, and I never create. So this is an exercise in commitment. Not that I have commitment issues. Rather, what I regularly commit to rarely fulfills me. I commit to my job, but if I didn’t have to work it, I wouldn’t work it. Two hours a day on the commute circuit? Two hours a day of poisoning the atmosphere and wearing down my body? No thank you. I commit to cleaning the house. To building habits and routines. To feeling productive. But that’s all a racket. True commitment is creating. It’s loving. So here I am, in a hotel room outside of Princeton, New Jersey typing these words and learning more about myself than I knew five minutes ago. I need to commit less often to the arbitrary. I need to commit less ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Albums of the Week (12.07.25 - 12.14.25)

Back again. Not so much a Daily Eclectoid as a When I Feel Like It Eclectoid. That's okay. I logged every album I listened this week. Kind of. Each day, I wrote down every album I listened to. If I listened to half an LP one day and finished the following day, I didn't log it. If I listened to something on separate days, I logged it twice. That didn't happen this week, but it will. I'd like to log Mondays to Sundays, but I started last Sunday, so you get a bit of everything. I'm making this up as we go. Here's Sunday 12.07 to Sunday 12.14: Sunday, December 7, 2025 In Nigeria (1985) - Yusef Lateef Ella & Louis Christmas (1960) - Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong Butterfly 3000 (2021) - King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Give Love At Christmas (1980) - The Temptations Poppy Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza (2025) - Various  Monday, December 8, 2025 Club Nostalgia (Special Edition) (2024) - Minuit Cafe Groove Memories (Japanese...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conan: Black Starlight (Book Review)

Conan: Black Starlight (2023) - John C. Hocking Before diving into this series of e-books, which promises to capture the spirit of the original Conan tales, I'd read very little Robert E. Howard. I've since started reading the complete Conan stories, and I've found that this one really did nail it. Firstly, props to Hocking for crafting Black Starlight to be entirely accessible to any reader despite being a direct sequel to his own Conan and the Emerald Lotus . He doesn't include an exposition dump, yet he is able to clue the reader in just enough to keep them from getting lost. What you have is an extremely accessible sword-and-sorcery tale that is riveting from start to finish. In an effort to cross the River Styx undetected, Conan and friends end up in what seems to be a ghost town, but they are soon set upon by zombies and richly described demons that attempt to kill the travelers and steal the sorceress Zelandra's supply of E...
Post a Comment
Read more