Toots and Twista

There will always be an audience for reggae and rap, ska and hip hop, even if insipid radio hardly has space for these otherwise progressive rocksteady styles. One can stay tuned to a favorite station for hours on end, and wonder why the disc jockey can‘t for one holy instance cue the sound proceedings to a song by hip hop‘s fastest mouth Twista, or the now legendary reggae artist Toots and the Maytals.

Twista‘s CD out in the market, Kamikaze, and Toots and the Maytals‚ latest offering, True Love, are both showcases of artful collaboration with diverse musicians spanning generations as well tattoo fetishes, both brimming with an exuberant and consummate musicianship. Twista and Toots know how to let their featured guests shine as they play and feed off each other, sidestepping any potential disjointed rigmarole.

Upon first perusal of Twista‘s CD, we wondered if the artist might not actually be the Pinoy band Kamikaze, until we observed Twista himself blacker than usual.

Cover art match the foreboding lyrics, which we can hardly keep with in the rapper’s typical breathless, take no prisoners velocity. Motormouth‘s work ethic however is no mere pyrotechnic, as his voice becomes another instrument in the frenetic proceedings, the rhythm section providing thick cover for his, uh, kamikaze-like recitations.

So we get treated to Twista’s work with guests 8 Ball and Too Short, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx, Jazze Pha, R Kelly and Cee Lo among others who sound similarly Greek to us, we haven‘t really been up to date with developments in the hip hop rub-a-dub world. Yet we like what we hear, and certainly the music here can hold something in store for us other than profane enlightenment, parental guidance suggested, but certainly anyone taking public transport in our country would have gotten used by now to such cuss language.

We won‘t even dare start on a rundown of songs or a corresponding analysis or critique, other than that the numbers are definitely provocative and never boring, and Twista‘s certainly a find in the eye of a storm that continues to whip through the path started by other equally brilliant but perhaps long since disbanded acts like Arrested Development, Snoop Doggy Dog and Digital Underground.

Now Toots and the Maytals are a different page altogether, but along with Twista should give us an idea of the depth and breadth of black music.

When reggae first broke out in the ‘70s just when ska and rocksteady had ingested too much ganja in Kingston that the beat had to slow down to a hypnotic, stoned chunka-chunka, Toots was on a par with the pioneer dreadlocked rastaman, Bob Marley. Marley has long kicked the bucket though his music lives, but both Toots and his music still kick out the jams and know a good riddim when they lay the groove down.

True Love has more familiar names as Toots and Maytals collaborators, mostly old fogeys like us who grew up and were influenced by Marley and Toots himself and his funky Kingston, saliva and snot and blood and sweat dripping and all through the snap, crackle, pop of a forgotten vinyl paradise.

There are Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, No Doubt, Bunny Wailer and Keith Richards, among others, we won‘t even say breathing new life to old Toots classics, rather give the songs a funky twist to a younger generation of listeners, who might not even have been a twinkle in the eye of their parents when Clapton first heard Marley sing I Shot the Sheriff and decided to do a version of it, helping to usher in a reggae renaissance in the mid-’70s.

Clapton here remains in fine wah-wah form in the song Pressure Drop, culled from the cult film The Harder They Come also in that discombobulating decade. Funky Kingston done with Bootsy Collins and the Roots doesn’t have the scrappiness of the original lifted from a reggae sampler almost 30 years ago, but how can things stay the same for a man who‚s been in and out of prison and is a certified survivor.

That prison episode is documented in "54-46 was my Number," this time with Jeff Beck running roughshod on his guitar with the trademark tonal and atonal acrobatics, shaping and bending and twisting the song to a plateau of contortions, a 21st century jailhouse rock it is.

Slide guitar has its way on the title cut with Raitt, and Richards is a revelation in vocals and rhythm guitar in Careless Ethiopians, tapping the musical form‘s latent spirituality.

A worthy comfort it is to hear Toots and the Maytals still vital and unambiguous enough to move the listener to get up stand up and not give up the fight for jah rastaman redemption song. I and I will not be disappointed.