Next Up: Soundclash 12.26 | Taking The Piss 1.23 | The Champion Superior Soundsystem 1.16 Click event to check mix

Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, original trumpeter and founding member of the Skatalites, died a little over a week ago. He fought off colon cancer for seven months, and I regret being unaware of that, though I knew he wasn't at full strength in recent years. I once shared a mojito with him at a fancy restaurant in DC, to which he came attired in a sharp shirt and pants, dreads in full-on display. A soft and fully-spoken fine man, that Johnny.

I first met Johnny in early 1999, in the context of a fortunate assignment I had for a Seattle museum where we were cobbling together an exhibit on the history of recorded music in Jamaica. The Skatalites and the Alpha Boys' School were two easy-to-target focal points, and both involved Johnny. I must've gotten a number for him at some point and called him, because when we visited him at his Mountain View Avenue home - the one next door to a rather dubious Kentucky Fried Chicken if memory functions still - it felt informal already.

Winston "Sparrow" Martin, the Alpha Bandmaster, was along for the ride, as was my colleague Dave Rosencrans, and, well, to cut to the chase, Johnny came out with his original Bundy trumpet from around 1958 (because we were there to hopefully acquire it for the exhibit) and we had a longish reasoning session with him. He put us at ease with small laughs and a friendly demeanor, and we moved easily from a formal hello to more engaging topics, world politics featuring prominently.

That trumpet is now housed at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, though regrettably not on the walls at the moment (email/call them and suggest otherwise). He'd named it "Annaloria." What he was playing live in the late '90s was Annaloria III, so the original came to us. What history in that trumpet. Listen to "Milk Lane Hop" and hear it in its youthful tones.

Brian Keyo got some key interview material with Johnny in the liner notes for the seminal "Foundation Ska" cd (Heartbeat Records), probably to this day a Top 5 must-have cd for serious fans of Jamaican music. From that we knew some of Johnny's back-story and knew also that he had a sense of his own history as well as that of the Alpha Boys' School. Of the nuns at Alpha and Sister Ignatius in particular, he felt that their dedication and involvement, even when disciplinary and harsh, rubbed off on him as a person, and he was thankful for it. Trombonist Rico Rodriguez has more or less said the same thing.

The actual musical training was left to the bandmaster though, and arguably the most influential in Alpha's history was Ruben Delgado, whom Johnny described as “very understanding and patient with students.” Talk about an interview that never happened - Delgado's story we'll likely never fully know.

On a subsequent trip we were able to get Johhny to come for a sit-down interview on camera, followed by a session with the then current Alpha Boys' band who were led and tutored by Sparrow Martin. Martin had been a contemporary of Johnny's when they both attended Alpha in the Forties and Fifties. So was Lester Sterling, Karl "Cannonball" Bryan and Rueben Alexander. Don Drummond was a few years older, but a friendship was begun then as well. I think of those two as potentially similar in temperament, because only Johnny did I ever hear countenance Drummond as possibly being "not crazy," but merely "melancholy" and prone to mood swings. Musicians will have these moods, he once said.

So with the Alpha Band, Johnny sat in on the classic "Rockfort Rock," sitting in a chair to the outside, leaving the spotlight to the youngsters even though it's his original trumpet line that raised that Studio One cut to the roof. It all felt so very normal and natural. There was no show being put on, and Sister Ignatius sat, as ever, placidly to the side.

In our interview we covered many topics. I looked at it over the weekend again for the first time in years. I'd forgotten how inviting his little laugh was. I mentioned in passing that we wouldn't bother getting into why he was dropped from the Jamaican Military Band (his first real employment post-Alpha), and his long chuckle was what you'd expect - absurdity and the human condition always copes just so. I guess at the time I didn't know enough about Rastafarianism to delve into that with him, and so I asked very little in that regard. I've read that his grandfather was a Rasta and that he'd felt that essential outlook even as a youngster.

But I can imagine the difficult route one could face at that time in Jamaica, playing a trumpet for the military, with all its emphasis on the "classical" (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach - luckily all part of Alpha's training), trying to bottle one's jazz instincts (he was a big fan of Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown & Dizzy Gillespie, among others), and somehow adapt one's religious and pan-African outlooks within a society and employment that was unaccepting. In this sense I also thought of him similar to Drummond, having an outsider's impulse, yet with the talent and upbringing to walk knowingly on the inside. Still, struggling was constant.

It's guesswork on my part, but while Drummond's sheer and undeniable genius on the instrument had him essentially recruited by a well-established "society band" like the Eric Deans Orchestra, Moore's ability, part raw and part immensely skillful, meant that he was always going to be slightly sitting on the edges looking in. He'd go see the Deans’ Orchestra perform at the Bournemouth Club - later the Skatalites' veritable home turf - and Deans would call him the "little military band boy." Johnny laughed again as he recounted that possible slight. Eventually, he would himself play in a much smaller and lesser known society band as well, not minding at all the mambos and cha cha cha's, but when that fell afoul of his Rasta identity (not wanting to cut his hair), out he was, this time for good.

Count Ossie's camp in Wareika Hills had already beckoned on earlier occasions, as it did for those that were more gainfully employed - Drummond, Rico and Roland Alphonso even in those early days - and it was there he spent more and more time. At Count Ossie's, a sort of “freeform” style of music was played, as Johnny described it, and by his recollection, after a performance that they gave at one of Coxsone Dodd’s Downbeat soundsystem dances at the Success Club in the late ‘50s, the idea to enter the studio and record music with Count Ossie’s drumming started to germinate. Dodd and others eventually got round to that idea, and you can hear a young Johnny Moore playing with Clue J (a fellow former Military Band player) & his Blues Blasters on "Milk Lane Hop" and other shuffle & ska tunes from the early '60s. All Alpha alums on "Milk Lane Hop," with Moore, Bobby Gaynair & Rodriguez providing the swinging brass to this pre-ska outing.

Looking back at himself, Johnny wondered if he really knew what he was doing on the trumpet. He was young and recording was such a new thing, plus he brought that intangible that was the relative outsider status from this Rasta/Count Ossie background. But then there was that talent.

And so we come to the recording years, the Skatalites years, the Soul Brothers and Soul Vendors years, the Supersonics years, and the many solo offerings he gave to various smaller producers in the early reggae era. He didn't compose as many songs as some of the other Skatalites, though those that he did were always very distinctive. That odd motif he plays in "Ska La Parisienne" strikes me as quintessentially "Dizzy" - a slightly abstract and challenging way to anchor the melodic underpinning. You couldn't compare him at all to Baba Brooks, and I sensed impatience within Johnny with how Brooks played. He wanted to move beyond, create something new and not rely on standard sounds and approaches. It was why he loved Drummond's playing as well, that combination of smooth articulation, incredible speed, and the off-setting melancholy and anger moments in his compositions. I think he related.

Clue J & the Blues Blaster
"Milk Lane Hop" (early 1960s)

The Skatalites
"Ska La Parisienne" (1964/65)

Johnny Moore & Karl Bryan
"Big Big Boss" (1969)

Johnny Moore & the Skatalites
"Yogi Man" (1965)

Dizzy & Soul Syndicate
"Riot" (1971)

The Skatalites
"Beardman Ska" (1964/65)

Johnny Moore & the Skatalites
"Sudden Destruction" (1965)

Soul Vendors
"Swing Easy" (1967)

Johnny Moore
"Reflections of Don D." (1969)