... Dennis, Lincoln, Gregory, troubador trinity ...

... one of the sustaining joys in life is the sound of reggae music ... as a living entity it compares to those hardy species of tree that thrive in the tropics ... trees with anchoring roots that respond to adversity by sending out another shoot, or branch, often in a new direction ... strong like Lignum Vitae, expansive like Guango and ubiquitous like macka or cassie-bush ...

... the Jamaican musical continuum is as old as slavery, even older if you include earlier African and European influences ... for purposes at hand I focus on the last fifty years and the successive passage of definable eras ... one such era has been slipping away since the death of Dennis Brown more than a decade ago ... this year, with the loss of Sugar Minott and now Gregory Isaacs, that process is all but complete ...

... Gregory, a favourite son since the early-seventies, had the sort of talent that proved greater than the sum if its parts ... his appeal leans quirkily on a smooth-as-silk, post-nasal croon, sounding like no-one before or since ... with a keen awareness for a sentimental lover's lyric, a penchant for natty threads and the sort of laconic inner-city cool only Snoop can match nowadays, the Cool Ruler had the skill-set to remain popular down the years ... he drew excited audience responses simply by sauntering onstage moaning contentedly into his cordless microphone ...

... Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown, two of the most identifiable figures in reggae due to their unique voices and prodigious output, released steady streams of music over decades, the best of which can be found strewn throughout the prolific chaos of their extensive back-catalogues ...

... these beloved performers rode the riddim to stardom and international acclaim ... from the beginning, the Jamaican public-at-large identified with their brand of sufferer soul ... they started their own labels and were providers for extended families ... the fact that Brown and Isaacs had long-term cocaine habits which hastened their departures from this mortal coil is a sad footnote to the often collaborative legacies they left on record ...

... Gregory sings Dennis, Dennis sings Gregory ... the sheer amount of joint-releases and artistic overlap from them cements their legacies as twin-pillars of the reggae industry ...

... Lincoln "Sugar" Minott wasn't known for the type of drug struggles his two more celebrated compadres became associated with but his career followed a similar path of autonomy and mentorship, garnering the respect of peers and public, more than justifying his inclusion in this company ...

... the genius of entertainers like these is related to their abilities to carry cultural pride along with them as they journey out into wicked Babylon on their way to a better place ... if it is understood that Babylon will present obstacles as well as opportunity, then the way forward requires not just performing talent, but also, love in your heart, commitment to progress and versatility ...

... this trinity of troubadors sang in the voice of African identity, each living the music and honoring it as a driving force for positive energies ... despite occasional expediency-motivated, undercooked releases there was always good music being made, often stamped only on scarce vinyl to be collated latterly on collector compilations or torrent download ...

... Minott mastered Lovers Rock and Brown was born to sing songs of love, but it is Gregory who stirs it up with his ability to help us to ... how shall I put it? ... um ... move the action from the parlour to the boudoir, when it's time for business ...

... it has fast become cliche to big-up Gregory by singling out the iconic "Night Nurse", I was trying to avoid that trap but you just have to heart this tune and it's many remixes ... we've heard Dennis Brown's voice sampled to great effect ... look for same with Gregory Isaacs who's always killer when dropped in a dubmix ...

... in due course, life-lessons from the Original Dapper Don must be absorbed as we try not to repeat the mistakes of our forebears, but thankfully for Gregory and those who continue to enjoy him, it's the good you do that will live on after you ...

... a cutlass and a whippa-snippa ...

... "we use machete to farm, but the worl' in general use machine ... so, when you check it out, can machete compete wid machine?"... when pronounced appropriately (machete sounds more like ma-she-ate) and uttered with knowing, tonal certainty, the humble man's wisdom resonates with truth and significance ... it captures an entire polemic as explored in Stephanie Black's insightful 2001 documentary Life and Debt ... a socio-fiscal, musical representation of Jamaica in the heady seventies and the Developing World's relationship with the IMF and U.S. regional interests of the time ...

... while I highly recommend the film as essential viewing if you're going to inhabit the pages of Ackeelover Chronicles with me, my thoughts, as I sweated through some yardwork with my trusty weed-whacker in the Caribbean heat, were of a more mundane and literal nature ... one of those while-you-work contemplations, yet still inspired by the veracity of the quote from the film ...

... I ain't sayin' the grass is any greener on the other side but I was picturing in my mind a previous time when I enjoyed clearing overgrowth at my former domicile on B.C.'s temperate Sunshine Coast, wielding instead the aforementioned machete or cutlass ... scything readily through clustered dandelions and cabbagy ground-cover causing neighbors to scratch their heads at the rudimentary approach, even as they kept one nervous eye on the flashing blade ...

... in the Caribbean the cutlass is a time-honored and honorable extension of a worker's arm, just as the weed-whacker has become in richer nations ... my own, a Brasilian twenty-six incher, is always close at hand for all sorts of everyday tasks ... (yeh-yeh, I know how that sounds) ... but the sheer irony of this mirror experience, being in the tropics, handily racing through the yard with a Stihl Pro-Series FS-85R machine, was not lost on me ...

... just as there was an audience for my cutlass capers in Canada, so too here ... Australian visitors got a kick out of the pervasive islandwide use of the "whipper-snipper", to use an evocative Down Under term for the gas-powered tool sometimes unassumingly referred to as a "line-trimmer" ...

... figurative analysis of the disparity between machete and machine can be macro or micro, adding textural insight to your perception of geo-political economics ... Life and Debt draws from thoughtful sources and a liberated Jamaican perspective ... it's not always possible to achieve clear-cut conclusions with a subject so broad, still, I'm now able to testify to one conviction ... the stone-cold truth is, weed-snippin'-whipper-whackin' will save on time and labor ...

... but "alas," said the cutlass ... "it can't chop a coconut" ...

... the power of one ... a Happy 1st Birthday ...

... Minnie Mouse will give you one guess

who she baked this cake for,

that's right Little Miss Clever, it's for you,

one now, and to come many more ...

... this one's for your Birthday Kailani,

one soon becomes two and then three,

oh my, what a bright happy life

this one figures to be ...

... y'see, birthday-uno is more than a digit,
it's a one-time calendar date,
the year-one counting point,
a fresh start out of the gate ...

... you only turn one once, I'm certain,

and no-one grows up to be younger,

one year after the next

baby gets older, bigger, and stronger ...

... as you learn, take one step at a time,

one flip then flap and fly,

here's one endless opportunity

for you, to reach way up high ...

... put one seed in the ground

one plant it will grow,

one ray of sunshine

can light the whole show ...

... one hour of darkness is

one hour too many,

may you have lots of friends

and not even one enemy ...

... just one more thing to remember

though, you'll never be one again,

regardless what number the birthday,

to you, it's One Love always ... amen ...

... Pierre: une nouvelle famille Canadienne ...

... "Trudeau was like havin' an extra uncle," comes the sound of social worker Gene's voice rising off-screen over grainy film images of metropolitan Toronto in the poignant Canadian feature-film A Winter Tale ...

... I play the character Gene in the scene which involves reminiscence of a time when Canada opened up to an immigration increase from hitherto non-traditional feeder regions, including the island nations of the West Indies ...

... these substantial waves of immigration are commonly attributed to the leadership and vision of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who passed away a decade ago, leading many to pin the hot-button topic of Canadian multiculturalism squarely on his often rose-adorned lapel ...

... the movie scene unfolds and my voice-over segues seamlessly from Gene's wistful memoir into a rallying manifesto from the man himself ..."Canada must be one, Canada must be progressive, and Canada must be a just society!" ... that particular speech being only one of the many memorable legacies of Canada's fifteenth Prime Minister ...

... Canada first came into my Jamaican consciousness in 1967 when my irrepressibly itinerant maternal grandmother felt the urge to get a window on the world by visiting Expo'67 in Montreal ... from then on Canada was on my radar ...

... this timing coincided with the emergence of Trudeau in national politics and pre-figured that fascinating union with the junior Margaret who boosted his fame and bore him three sons ...














... throughout the seventies that same consciousness was fed by a relationship between Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and Pierre Trudeau who had developed a mutual respect at the influential London School of Economics ...

... both charismatic leaders managed to stake out middle-ground in the Cold War and were less confrontational with Cuban jefe Fidel Castro than the regional giant U.S.A. tended to be ...














... Canada's sense-of-self as a nation has always been linked, like the tides are to the moon, to the prevailing winds in America ...

... there's inevitability to that for multiple reasons, but Trudeau always felt strongly that differences between the two close friends should be as honored as the similarities ...

... many of us who became (new) Canadians during Trudeau's tenure understood and agreed, especially when, at times, interests seemed to conflict ...














... one of the enduring/endearing attributes Trudeau radiated was his moral certitude, he could never be called directionless ...

... that spirit, needless to say, is priceless in a politician ...

... when John Lennon (who'd be seventy today) said, "if all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau there would be world peace," one could appreciate the thinking behind this admittedly utopian pronouncement from the peacenik crusader ...













... Lennon himself, famous Beatle that he was, had his moments of fun-loving frivolity while simultaneously harboring keen social conscience ... Pierre too could play court-jester, adding levity to his day job in the serious world ...

... pirhouetting behind the Queen of England, sliding down bannisters, flashing mischievous middle-fingers or coining phrases like "fuddle duddle" are but a few examples ...

... to her credit, that same English monarch, not readily associated with  shenanigans or even amusement, didn't take the Pierre pirhouette as any sort of slight when she inked what was Trudeau's piece de resistance - the hard-fought-for 1982 patriation of The Canadian Constitution ...

... from London to Ottawa, with love ...

... it must be noted in any retrospective on Trudeau that there are those who bristle at the very mention of his name ... as with any politico there's the factor of polarisation to consider ...

... throughout Western Canada for instance, where there is deep-seated resentment at federal expenditure required to maintain official bilingualism, it's easy to spark a barroom brawl by defending Trudeau-era liberalism, and even the concept of hyphenated-nationality and multiculturalism ...

... additionally, in some quarters of Quebec, there is lingering distrust of the part of the Trudeau bloodline that is Anglo ...

... hmmm, maybe there's a lesson in this for Barack Obama ...

... or perhaps the lesson is for eldest son Justin (b. Xmas Day, 1971) now carving his own path in the world of Party Politics ...

... today's landscape is different from his father's so he'll do well to recognize that Pierre-style insouciance may read differently to the contemporary electorate ...

... on the other hand, I suspect he'll also benefit from residual effects of name-association among those who thought fondly of his father and the generations of Canadian voters who are descended from them ...

... after all, if Pierre was like an "extra uncle," then by extension, that makes this guy "cousin" Justin ...

... NBC UnderCovers Lady Gugu and Bo Ko ...

... UC seeks to peddle no parable, nor posit the meaning of life,

it sells us Bo Ko, Adonis, and dynamite doe-eyed screen wife,

a bald-pate smooth dresser, super-spy-polyglot-guy,
no joke folks, check it, the dude sure is fly ...

... what if wifey did sex-up Leo, or do what when and with whom,

our Lady Gugu in-the-Raw, the luscious Samantha Bloom,

personifies fantasy partner whether all dressed or undressin',

in truth and in fact, shawty's a real eyeball blessin' ...

... NBC's new show has style, an' chat liberally littered with quips,

you can count on JJ to work in those expansive location trips,

stories are simple with action-packed script-writin',

lotsa steamy set-ups, bold stunts and faux-fightin' ...

... prime-time stakes are high, win-lose is the sexpionage game,

and I say this not just 'cos a producer and I share a last name,

but thirteen's a short season, may ratings beg for more,

because this one's not for shelf or cutting-room floor ...

... call it fun-on-the-run, a lil reggae spice on the soundtrack,

hard 'n' heavy isn't compulsory just 'cos the two leads are black,

some a dem critics tek tings too serious, man!,

smart casting's central to Jah master-plan ...

...there's the safe time-slot before the top network sitcom on air,

to help keep it locked 'til there's better cause to be elsewhere,

Modern Family on ABC has that distinction, if you'll allow,

so, my Wednesday night TV is all dialed in for now ...

*** November 3rd - POST MORTEM ***

... guess I was wrong, best wishes to TV's best looking pair,

cancellation's a bitch when the ratings ain't there,

one month later it's a Wednesday nite shake-up,

hope these guys had a pretty tight pre-nup.