Photo Alexei Afonin

WINSTON RODNEY HASN’T moved a muscle in over an hour. Seated with his eyes closed, muscles knit into an expression of intense concentration, the man whom the world has known for the last 39 years as Burning Spear is oblivious to the buzz of activity all around him. On the last day of a recording odyssey that began in October, Rodney and Chris Daley, a veteran engineer flown in from Kingston, are hunkered down in New York’s Magic Shop studio locking in the final mix for Burning Spear’s 22nd studio album, Jah is Real.

Rodney currently considers himself semi-retired, yet he still maintains a pace of work and creativity that would exhaust a person half of his age. From the moment he first entered Clement Dodd’s legendary Studio One in 1969 after being encouraged by Bob Marley to move from the country to Kingston in search of a career in music, Burning Spear has never eased up or looked back. Signed to Island Records during reggae’s golden era in the ‘70s, he began to sculpt a sound and create a musical style that, in the words of Chris Blackwell, “was like nobody else’s. Even before he started singing—after two bars you could tell it was Burning Spear. Right from the beginning, he had a beat of his own.”

That beat has gone on to become one of the most distinctive sounds in world music. Almost impossible to nail down, it’s perhaps best described as a crossroads where nyabinghi drums meet Fela’s African orchestral music on a cosmic plane first explored by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Throw in a healthy dose of roots reggae and Rastafarian millennial philosophy mixed through Marcus Garvey’s pan-African politics and you’ll get an idea where Burning Spear’s music lives.

Thirty years on the road playing with a large band refined his sound to such an extent that, by the late ‘90s, Burning Spear had become the closet thing reggae had to a Duke Ellington. Working within a loose reggae structure, night after night Rodney would lead the band through some very challenging musical territory as they showed off turn-on-a-dime chops and group interplay that was second to none. His records were much the same.

“A lot had happened to me since the recording of Our Music,” Spears says of his 2005 album. “I wanted that to be reflected in what I recorded this time around. For this album, we decided to do something a little bit different. I called up Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell to see what they could add to my music. Bernie was very familiar with my work, so he could come up with all kinds of keyboard lines that were very creative and he funked up my sound a bit. Bootsy needed a little more coaxing, but we had a great time in the studio. They are such veterans in their area. It was a blessing to be with such creative people again. The vibes at the Magic Shop were the nicest I’d experienced since the days at Tuff Gong with Errol Brown at the controls.”

To a large extent, Rodney’s renewed enthusiasm can be attributed to his decision to take charge of all aspects of his career. With his wife, Sonia, he has been slowly buying back his own catalog, reissuing it at the rate of an album or two a year and is now in charge of his own distribution, booking and runs an Internet business from his home.

Listening to “Run for Your Life,” a cut off of Jah is Real, with its chorus of “I’m just a man, not a rich man, just a Rastaman,” it is obvious that the journey from Creation Rebel to Internet entrepreneur has been a joyous and empowering one for Rodney. As he outlines the obstacles that he’s faced in cutting free of his old associations,

Rodney repeatedly chants the word “Internet” over and over with the same fervor he invoked “Garvey” or “Rastafari” on earlier recordings.

Spear’s eyes shine as we listen through Jah is Real one more time. “I’ve been lucky and blessed you know. Things come along to test your faith, but every day upon waking and sleeping, I talk to the Father and he has never let me down. He has never given me a burden that is too heavy to carry. Yes, I have been ripped off. But, do you know what? You can’t look back on the past, and as long as you keep on doing what you’re doing, you will gain more than what you’ve lost.”  

For more global beats, check out www.globalrhythm.com

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