Culture Shock: Jah Shaka and the power of music to bring change

When Jah Shaka speaks it’s hard not to take him seriously. There’s the gentle levity of his Jamaican patois, and his bottomless brown eyes, like those of a prophet. It doesn’t hurt that he’s got the flow to match the eminent presence.

Shaka has been preaching peace, love and reggae in London since the late 1960s, with his revered Jah Shaka Sound System. He opened a recent talk at the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) in Tokyo with a look back at his early days in music. At a time when Ukip and Nigel Farage are whipping up a misplaced protest vote in England, it was an elegant illustration of the power of music for immigrant families, and the role they and their culture play in their new homes.

Shaka arrived in London in 1956. At the time, he says, immigrants “had to be skilful, because England wouldn’t allow you to come to just sit around. Those people, when they came to London, it was to help the system of London.”

Shaka's contemporaries in England were largely the "Windrush generation", named after a ship that docked in England in 1948 from Kingston, Jamaica. Most of its hundreds of passengers had responded to an ad in a Jamaican newspaper offering cheap transport to anyone wanting to work in the UK. "In the Windrush time, in London on the doors of the houses, there were signs saying 'no blacks, no Irish and no dogs'. Growing up, our parents would tell us, 'You have to work very hard to overcome such a system, such a regime.' "

As Shaka explains it, music was vital to these early immigrants, far beyond its entertainment value. “When people left Africa for the Caribbean, all they could bring with them was their music, their songs and their memories from home. So, over the years, this is all that people had to keep them together.”

When, generations later, their descendants made the trip to London, music was again the bedrock of their existence. “In the 1950s and 1960s in London there were house parties – 50, 60 people with only record players. It helped families know other families, which was important at that time, because the people were segregated.”

Freddie Cloudburst

As a child, Shaka cut his musical teeth with Freddie Cloudburst in southeast London. “At that time no children or young person was allowed to touch equipment. Because of that we were looking after it, polishing it, so the owner would let us play records.”

The audience at these house parties was older people, “50, 60 years old – so we had to know what kind of records to play for older people”. The young Shaka would tailor those fledgling sets to keep his parents and their friends happy, and Jamaican music had yet to step out of the shadow of its vibrant black US counterpart. “We had Nina Simone, Tamla/Motown, Diana Ross, The Temptations, The Drifters.” This music carried its own message of hope, as the civil-rights movement gained traction, and the American songs were carried across the water to the Jamaican immigrant parties of southeast London.

As Shaka sees it, each musician was carrying on the work of those pioneers. “When you practise something, eventually it will reach somewhere. You set high targets, and if you don’t reach them, at least you are still somewhere. [Thanks to this music] so many messages from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and these people were sown among our people.”

Shaka's thoughts about the power of music aren't limited to his own experiences. "In Poland the Freedom Party messages were spread by reggae music. When Bob Marley went to Zimbabwe for independence: reggae music. People learn to speak English by listening to music. I've been in Ghana, and someone I met can sing all of One Love by Bob Marley but can't speak English. They learn to speak English around the world through the music. It is important not just to dance but to listen to the message."

The message

All of this – the power of music and its message, immigrants’ capacity to contribute to the system of a city, and the peaceful broadening of a country’s cultural horizons – sounds like something of a nightmare for the anti-immigration platform in the UK.

Shaka's appearance at the RBMA coincided with the publication of a study which concludes that European migrants in the UK have paid out much more in taxes than they have received in benefits. The Fiscal Impact of Immigration to the UK says that European migrants to the UK contributed £20 billion net to UK public finances between 2000 and 2011.

That might make for queasy reading for Ukip voters, but they can always rely on Jah Shaka for help. He references a group of unnamed professors from Cambridge who studied the origins of music. According to Shaka, they concluded that “bass helps the bowels of the human body. [This is] not Shaka, now. A professor from Cambridge says bass is good for your digestive system.”

How’s that for a sound system?

lmackin@irishtimes.com