Bring That Beat Back

Lloyd Delpratt, one of the musicians featured on the compilation CD Jamaica to Toronto: Soul, Funk & Reggae 1967-1974. Courtesy Lloyd Delpratt/Light In The Attic.

The TV at the back of Wisdom’s Barber & Beauty Salon is tuned to World Cup soccer. A young man with a razor-clean head watches from the closest of eight red barber’s chairs: elbows out, hands peaked under his chin. The announcers’ calls clatter the length of the narrow shop; the crowd roars along beside them. Wisdom’s is a fixture of the Caribbean enclave on Toronto’s Eglinton Street West (near Dufferin Avenue), and perhaps the only spot in the city where you can have your hair cut by a world-class soul singer.

Counter-to-ceiling mirrors span the wall from the watcher’s seat to the front window, where said singer — Jimmy Wisdom — sculpts a customer’s high, tight fade with electric clippers. Neither man says much. When the work is done, Wisdom gives a gracious goodbye, counts his payment, and drapes his smock on the back of a chair. He sits to tell the story of how he came to Toronto from Jamaica almost 40 years ago.

I’ve already read the broad strokes, in the liner notes of Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk & Reggae 1967-1974, a new compilation from Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records. The album revisits a forgotten scene from Toronto’s past, when dozens of ace West Indian musicians emigrated north to the city. Their post-move, made-in-Canada music melded island ska, rocksteady and reggae styles with North American soul, funk and R&B. The resulting mélange, most often performed in the dance clubs that used to line downtown Yonge Street, was one of the sweetest sounds that Hogtown had ever heard. It still is.

Wisdom was born in Montego Bay in 1947. He started singing as a boy, at first with a military-style band that performed at town functions. He learned to play the flute and the piano, but excelled as a vocalist. “Sometimes after school, I would go to hotels with a dance group,” he recalls. Now 59, Wisdom has a salt-and-pepper goatee and full head of hair to match. “We’d do shows where you’d have limbos and those type of things going on. I would sing some folk songs, or anything that was suitable for that time.”

Musical duo Bob Williams and Jimmy Wisdom. Courtesy Bob Williams/Light In The Attic.

When he was 12, Wisdom gave a Christmas concert for a crowd that included Bob Williams, a local boy of near the same age. Hearing Wisdom’s voice encouraged Williams to test his own. So he did, and liked what he heard. The two became friends, and began performing together as Wisdom & Bob. “We’d do a lot of singing in hotels and clubs and all those places. So our repertoire [became] broad,” Wisdom says. “We’d give a performance and be right across the board. We’re not reggae singers, we’re not pop singers, we’re just singers. We’re singers who can sing any song, and take pride in singing songs — from gospel right up through jazz, pop. Wherever you take us, we can do that.”

Toronto became a top pick for West Indian emigrants after Canada relaxed its immigration standards in 1962 (to eliminate racial discrimination) and again in 1967 (with the introduction of a “points system” for individual applicants). During the autumn of the centennial year, Al Isen, a former bandmate of Williams and Wisdom, made the move to TO with Jo-Jo and the Fugitives. Soon after, the Trinidadian drummer sent word to Jamaica that the singing duo should follow. “[In Montego Bay,] I used to do some barbering too, on the side. You know, just cut the hair. I think that comes natural for me,” Wisdom says. “Al mentioned that they needed a barber [in Toronto], and that we guys should come because they needed good show singers.”

On Toronto’s club circuit, Bob & Wisdom (they reversed the name somewhere along the way) earned a minor reputation as Canada’s Sam & Dave. They were known for dressing well — Wisdom says they almost always appeared in new, custom-made clothes — while performing as frontmen for the Fugitives and, later, Doug Riley & the Silhouettes. Bob & Wisdom shared bookings at Club Jamaica, Blue Note and other (long-since closed) Yonge Street venues with a dream team of import players: Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy, Eddie Spencer, the Cougars, the Hitch-Hikers featuring the Mighty Pope, etc.

Keyboard master Jackie Mittoo — a founding member of the almighty Skatalites, and musical director of Studio One, Jamaica’s supreme temple of sound — was another ’68 transplant to Toronto. His presence had a magnetic effect, pulling many more island wonders north to join the crowd. When the expats began recording in Canada (most often on vinyl 45s pressed by lesser-known labels), Mittoo assumed an informal leadership role. “We were [all] young. I’d say we were drug free. We’re still drug free. That group, we weren’t involved in anything like that. We were clean guys, doing clean fun, clean singing, clean music,” Wisdom says.

At the outset of this soft exodus, reggae was but a budding flower in Jamaica. In Canada, the music was almost unheard of. In 1969, McGhie (a star guitarist who had performed with Bob & Wisdom, among many others, back in Jamaica) recorded a self-titled debut with his Sounds of Joy. Their masterwork became “the holy grail of Toronto funk” when a warehouse fire destroyed most available copies, and McGhie’s label declined to press replacements.

Decades later, in a roundabout way, a surviving copy of the ultra-rare LP inspired the making of Soul Funk & Reggae. “From the groove of the first track, Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye), the Steam cover that Wayne did, it was infectious,” says Light In The Attic co-founder Matt Sullivan, who first heard Sounds of Joy when friends played it for him three years ago. ”It’s hard to explain, but there’s something on that album, from Dirty Funk to Cool It and all those tracks — it’s soul music but it has a Caribbean flavour to it. It’s not really reggae, but it’s not really soul either. It’s immensely unique. It’s not just a Canadian [treasure], but something that I think people all over the world would enjoy.”

Sullivan and Vancouver DJ Sipreano, a.k.a. Kevin Howes, spent most of 2003 looking for McGhie, convinced he was still alive somewhere in Toronto. They knew that he had retired from making music in 1978, and then experienced a chemical imbalance in the brain that led to a period of homelessness. Updated information of his whereabouts proved almost impossible to find. “I tried to research the album, and would go to Google and type in Wayne McGhie. All that would come up would be seven or eight listings of Japanese fansites saying, ‘I’ll pay $1,000 for this record!’ And that was really it,” Sullivan says.

The search led them to Jay Douglas, former vocalist for the Cougars, and another Montego Bay-to-TO transplant. Douglas had seen McGhie on the streets of Toronto, and knew that Wayne’s sister Merline had taken him into her home in Scarborough. With Douglas as chaperone, the West Coasters flew to Toronto in January 2004 to, Sipreano recalls, “meet Wayne and his family, break bread, share music and stories.”

Guitarist Wayne McGhie. Courtesy M. Myles/Light In The Attic.

LITA re-released Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy a few months later. Sipreano and Sullivan became like scavengers who find buried gold beneath the sands of a beach, then run the length of the shoreline to share the good news. Soul Funk & Reggae is the product of the two years that followed, when Sipreano gathered all the archival vinyl that he could find from the period, and then distilled the best of it into a 53-minute compilation.

McGhie is a credited performer on five of the CD’s songs — and possibly played on several others, whose pedigree proved difficult to trace. Douglas’s Cougars, Eddie Spencer and Jo-Jo and the Fugitives each weigh in with two scorchers apiece;and Mittoo, who died of lung cancer in 1990, is well represented by Grand Funk, a jazzy instrumental that he cut in Toronto in 1971. LITA has plans to follow Soul Funk & Reggae with a half-dozen more reissues in its Jamaica to Toronto series. Sullivan hints that future releases could include documentary film footage.

But what of Bob & Wisdom? The duo parted paths in the late ’70s. Williams continued working in music, and maintains studios in Toronto and Jamaica today. Wisdom carried on with their backing players until New Year’s Eve 1980, when he disbanded the group, and has been cutting hair at his barber shop since. Their 1972 cover of Mac Davis’s I Believe In Music falls in the middle of Soul Funk & Reggae’s 16 songs. It’s a killer version, and a proper tribute to a career that never received the kudos that it deserved.

Lately, though, Wisdom has been running rehearsals for the Jamaica to Toronto project’s finest moment, an upcoming reunion concert at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. There, he, Douglas, Lloyd Delpratt and other surviving members of the old scene will take the stage together for the first time in 30 years. (Sipreano says McGhie is too ill to perform. Alas.)

“I never, ever dreamed that [this project] would have [happened]. I don’t know where it’s going to lead us. It might take off so well that they want to do shows elsewhere, but I don’t know. The Lord will definitely guide the path in which we should travel. So we’ll just let Him do all the guiding,” Wisdom says.“But this thing is turning into something big, so we have to take it seriously. And hope for that night, that everything turns out to be one big bash. You’ll have a nice time, I’m sure.”

Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk & Reggae 1967-1974 is available on July 11. Light In The Attic is (re-)re-releasing Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy on the same day. The Harbourfront Centre’s “Jamaica to Toronto” reunion concert is July 15.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.