Twilight Dance Series comes to end
By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press
SM PIER This summer’s Twilight Dance Series concerts took audiences on an aural trip around the world, from the smoky cabarets of the Dominican Republic with the Bachata Roja Legends to the heart of Africa with Zimbabwean and Ghanan superstars Oliver Mtukidzi and Rocky Dawuni.
In a fitting end to this international journey of music, the pier will host Jamaican reggae legends Toots and the Maytals tonight for its final installment. The band will take the stage for the entire night, starting at 7 p.m.
“The best-attended concerts on the pier are the reggae shows,” said Renè Engel, the co-producer of the Twilight Dance Series. “Reggae has developed a great community that has a deep love and appreciation for Jamaican music.”
Frederick “Toots” Hibbert has often been credited with inventing the term “reggae” to describe the upbeat dance music that was popular in Jamaica at the time but had no official genre.
“We used to have slang in Jamaica for people who didn’t dress properly. If a guy wasn’t dressed properly, girls would say that they were ‘streggae,’” Hibbert said. “So one day I was just writing a song with my guitar and I just came up with ‘reggae.’”
Engel sought after Toots and the Maytals since he began to work on the pier concerts in 2005.
“Toots happens to be my personal favorite guy in music,” Engel said.“Each season, the first person I went after was Toots. This season we were finally able to get him. I ended up getting my dream scenario.”
Toots and the Maytals have come a long way since the band formed in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1960s. In its many years together, the band has released over 50 albums. In 2005, it won a Grammy for the album “True Love,” which compiled the band’s classic songs performed alongside eclectic musicians including Willie Nelson, Manu Chao and No Doubt.
“It was so exciting,” Hibbert said of the album. “I never knew that they had listened to me for so long. And I did the same with them. I knew their songs, and they knew all my songs.”
Hibbert is no stranger to performing across genres. He has toured worldwide with bands including the Rolling Stones and the Dave Matthews Band. Toots and the Maytals has played more dates with the Stones than any other band.
“I’ve been everywhere,”Hibbert said of his constant touring. “I go all over, and everywhere I go people always stand up for us.”
Between tour dates, the band returns to Jamaica for a bit of relaxation before heading back into the studio to work. Although the constant work may seem exhausting to even the newest musicians, Hibbert embraces his hectic schedule and says that it doesn’t get in the way of creating new music.
“It’s easy, because you have different ideas come to you so you just have to take note of it and move along,” he said of the song-writing process.
In fact,life on the go seems to help Hibbert continue to make new and interesting music more than 40 years after he first began.
“I see things and I sing about it,”he said.“I don’t like to sing about politics, more about reality.”
The band is currently at work on a new album, which Hibbert said will veer slightly away from the reggae tunes for which he is so well-known.
“There will be maybe two reggae tracks, but this will be a special album,”Hibbert said.
He plans to explore more R&B and classic rock sounds that demonstrate his wide breadth of musical influences.
“I always listened to Ray Charles, Otis Redding, James Brown, Elvis Presley,” he said. “They’ll be different quality songs, and also a different quality reggae. I want to make people see who I really am, even more than before.”
Tonight, however, audiences can expect the classic reggae that has made Toots and the Maytals so loved worldwide.
Engel said the Jamaican Cultural Alliance planned to attend tonight’s show in full force. The band will be introduced by Roger Steffens, the original host of the Reggae Beat radio show on KCRW, who now tours internationally speaking about Jamaican music and displaying his extensive Bob Marley archives.
“If the music is not put together properly and it’s not positive,we don’t consider it reggae,” he said.“We have to make sure that the music is well-done,just like your meat at dinner,so it can be accepted and digested properly.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 28, 2008. Read the original PDF.