By Jim Morrison
Beres Hammond grew up the ninth of 10 children in Jamaica listening to his father’s jazz and soul records, artists like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. But ska was the sound of the moment on the island inevitably slipping into his style when he started competing in talents contests and soon joined his first group.
But it was his solo albums in the late 1970s that merged the sounds of Jamaica and the romantic soul of Cooke and Redding with “What One Dance Can Do” and “Groovy Little Thing.” But it was a series of albums in the 1990s starting with “A Love Affair,” featuring “Tempted to Touch,” “Is This a Sign” and “Respect to You Baby” that secured his stateside reputation as the king of Lovers Rock.
Hammond may be 68, but he hasn’t slowed, releasing “Let Me Help You,” a version of a long-lost classic “Let Me Help You Smile,” earlier this year. Hammond rarely gives interviews and did not do one to promote his double dates August 13 and 14 at The NorVa.
But he has told interviewers that lovers rock will endure. “I came, I saw, I enjoy, I partake. Suh Lovers Rock, can’t die. That is the first thing,” he said in an interview a few years ago. “And all Jamaican musicians, singers, deejays, dem shoulda acknowledge. Only we can kill dis.”
What is Lovers Rock? It’s reggae without the politics, but with the love, a romantic sound that Hammond helped pioneer. At its birth, it was seen as an alternative to Jamaica’s Rastafarian sound which was prevalent and which featured lyrics with religious and political messages.
“I never considered myself a reggae singer. I always called myself a singer… Meaning you can interpret anything anywhere in the world. I am so fortunate to have been a part of this reggae movement… one would easily call me a reggae singer. At this point I would not even fight you in saying what you just said…but I am a singer first,” he told another interviewer. “I am blessed to have been a part of this great movement of Jamaican reggae music. That is the kind of music that has propelled me into being, as this small little dot on the map, as far as Beres is concerned. I am very happy with it.”
He’s released 22 albums or compilations and has twice been nominated for a Best Reggae Album Grammy, first in 2002 for “Music is Life,” which featured Wyclef Jean, and for 2014’s “One Love, One Life,” which topped the reggae chart with “In My Arms” and “I Feel Good,” perhaps his biggest hit. He’s often worked with Buju Banton, recording “Falling in Love All Over Again,” Pull It Up,” and “Queen and a Lady.”
“The sound of reggae music turns up a lot of antennas all the while, but one has to have substance within your deliverance so that people can stay at a show for three hours just to listen to the music,” he said. “There is the difference, not just with me, but with the singers and early pioneers — like Max Romeo, Burning Spear, and Third World. The audiences take time out to listen to the lyrics of their songs; not just to the rhythm. If you don’t have that extra something for them to listen to, your little goose is cooked. I am happy that for the few years that I have been in the music, I have seen where the audiences have taken the time to listen to what I am saying and, have become a part of my life.”
Beres was awarded the Order of Jamaica by the Jamaican government in recognition of his “exceptional and dedicated contribution to the Jamaican music industry” in 2013.
“If you ask me what’s next, I wouldn’t be able to tell you,” he once said. “I never plan things, it just happens – vibes and everything follows in the right place at the right time. I don’t sit down and write songs, I just make things happen.”
Over five decades, he says, he’s never changed his approach. “Today, when I get in front of the mic, this is same kind of feeling. It’s almost like the first and the last chance I’m going to get to sing a song. So, passion is always there,” he said in one interview. “I’m happy that it hasn’t changed. You know, irrespective of what’s happening around you, I’m really happy that that part hasn’t changed, because maybe I would have given up long time. It’s like there’s nothing out there that can satisfy me and give me this feeling, you know, nothing, no woman, no nothing for me to almost witness the birth of something new and something that is going to last for a lifetime, the birth from your child, which is a song.”
WANT TO GO?
Beres Hammond
August 13 & 14
The NorVa
