AUTHENTIC MENTO & CALYPSO

SUGAR BELLY COMBO

LINSTEAD MARKET

SUGAR BELLY , born WILFRED WALKER, is Jamaica’s most famous player of the bamboo saxophone.

Like most players of the instrument, SUGAR built his instruments himself from a piece of bamboo with a reed lashed to one end and a bell-shaped piece of aluminium or wood at the other.

While there were other men who played this kind of instrument (including WILFRED EDWARDS, who played on the recording issued on the Chin’s Radio Service label and who was later in LORD TANAMO’s band), SUGAR was the best known of them all.

Trying to find SUGAR’s recording can be difficult, because much of his early work was as an uncredited sideman. He can probably he heard on some of the Jamaican 78rpm recordsfrom the mid-1950s.

It is more certain that he played (without due credit, however) on some of COUNT OWEN’s early LP’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Later, in the mid-1960s, he was theleader on a few sessions released as (now-rare) singles for TREASURE ISLE.

It was not until 1971, however, that he was given the opportunity to record an entire album of his own music.

CLEMENT “COSXONE” DODD first saw SUGAR’s performing in bars around Kingston in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Although sometimes looked down upon as a mere “country” instrument, DODD was impressed by SUGAR’s unusual expressive abilities on the bamboo sax and suggested that he come to his studio and make a record.

SUGAR finally found his way into 13 Brentford Road in 1971.

This LP, the first of two at STUDIO ONE, was the result.

This first LP presents SUGAR leading his Calypso Group ( of course, in Jamaica calypso and mento are sometimes used interchangeably to describe “folk” music) and is one of the only recorded examples of this kind of band from this period not recorded for a hotel.

This record foreshadowed the mento-reggae style that emerged after 1972, for which SUGAR’s second LP for STUDIO ONE ( entitled Sugar Merengue ) is an excellent example.

By the time of his death in 1990, SUGAR was not only a well-known and respected mento musician, but sadly, one of the last practitioner of his special instrument.

This LP, an important recording in the history of Jamaican music, captures SUGAR BELLY’s playing at its best.

*Extracted from the LP cover*