Cymande: Promised Heights
photo: Dean Chalkley
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Cymande have always been a revelation. That so many listeners have testified to awe at their first encounters with the cult heroes—whether from sound systems, boomboxes, Discmans or mp3s—speaks to a potency of their fusion that has only intensified with time.
From their outset in the early ‘70s, Cymande refused categorization with polyrhythmic soul-funk stompers and psych-rock incantations. The Caribbean born, South London-based musicians expressed their experience without compromise, and in turn earned a warm embrace from American audiences and the cold shoulder of the British recording industry. After four years and three albums netted next to no recognition at home, the artists parted ways in 1975—but their impact deepened in their absence.
Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, crate-diggers dusted off notched LPs from Cymande’s heyday to discover a message waiting to be heard. Their music found a second life through DJs of the emergent hip-hop and rare-groove movements, who gave voice to a new generation by decoding diasporic knowledge from their floor-filling beats. With each sample—De La Soul’s “Change in Speak,” Wu Tang Clan’s “Problems” and the Fugees’ “The Score,” among countless others—the band earned more devotees eager to trace those breakbeats back to their mythicized source.
Fifty years after their prolonged hiatus began, Cymande have returned with Renascence, which was issued via BMG in January. On their first widely released record in a half-century, founding members Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio rekindle their creative fire with a seven-piece band of longtime fans. “It was something we always wanted to do, but it ended up taking much longer than we intended,” Scipio says. “We hope that with the kind of support that it has been garnering, we’ll have something that is truly magnificent and representative of Cymande.”
The pair’s furtherance of the style they pioneered in their youth is as much a renewal as a continuity. While new voices have brought nuance, Cymande’s long-awaited comeback reveals that their shapeshifting sound and spirit are timeless. “We’ve always tried not to limit ourselves, and we’ve sustained that scope,” Patterson relates. “If you’re wondering what’s new, well, that is a forever thing.”
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“Cymande” is a calypso term for dove, drawn from Lord Nelson’s 1962 hit “Pigeon and Dove.” To the band’s core duo, the dove symbolizes peace, love and unity, foundational themes of their music, as well as a connection to their heritage.
Patterson and Scipio were born and spent their childhoods in Guyana. Their families were friends on the island—then still a British colony—and settled on the same street in Balham when they emigrated in 1958 and 1963. “That was our home base for a long period of time,” Patterson says, calling from his children’s place in London. “In fact, for many people from our country, this was their location when they got here. Guyanese, Trinidadians, Jamaicans—that was the community in those days.”
“It was an area rich with musicians and new ideas,” Scipio recalls from his kids’ address in Kent, England. “That late ‘60s, early ‘70s period was a very vibrant time for music.”
Spurred by the cultural exchange that filled the air in their neighborhood, the self-taught instrumentalists fashioned individual styles from their own eclectic interests. Patterson patterned his agile, melodic guitar approach after giants like Jimi Hendrix, Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell. Scipio favored syncopation with his bass, citing Miles Davis’ electric era and the indigenous rhythms of his adolescence in Guyana. After collaborating in experimental jazz and Afrobeat outfits, they set out for something all their own.
“We were trying to make music that was different. For that reason, we used a lot of time signatures and things that weren’t done often in those days,” Patterson reflects. “In every project that we’ve embarked on together, we have crafted the music around our desire to be original.”
In 1971, Patterson and Scipio assembled seven other artists from their local circuit to pursue a wider palette of influences. The new collaborators, all self-taught and Caribbean-born, stirred their diverse musical perspectives into a sonic expression of their shared experience. Their first sessions yielded a heady cocktail of funk, soul, jazz, calypso, blues-rock, reggae, highlife, R&B and more—a veritable history of Black music set to undeniable grooves. Listeners dubbed their creation “Nyah-rock,” referencing the Nyabinghi order of the Rastafarian tradition that informed their rhythms.
Just as Cymande’s roots shaped their syncretic sound, everyday life in minority communities became the core focus of their lyrics. When rising anti-immigrant polemics of the ‘60s led to social marginalization, the artists met the prejudice they faced with songs that revel in Afro-Caribbean culture, attend to common wounds and advocate for resistance.
“The music we were coming with wasn’t based on anything that was popular at the time—what we were trying to do was pretty much new,” Scipio observes. “It really speaks to our experiences in our community. As young musicians, the only voice we had to communicate how we were feeling was through our music. I suppose that presented a problem for the music industry at the time because they didn’t want to be a party or provide a medium for the kind of message we were trying to put out.”
“They didn’t even try to push us into a direction we didn’t want to go—they tried to push us out the door,” Patterson laughs. “You’re lucky enough to get in the door in the first bloody place!”
Cymande’s nonconformity was rewarded when a basement club gig on the Soho strip caught the ear of veteran pop producer John Schroeder, who promptly offered to cut their demos. Weeks later, Schroeder flew a sample from their session out to Cannes’ Midem trade show and returned to London with an album order from Chess/ Janus Records and a briefcase packed with cash to fund it. By early 1972, less than a year after their formation, Cymande had their self-titled debut and a lead single in “The Message,” a sauntering reggae-funk call for collectivity propelled by a blistering conga backbeat from Pablo Gonsales. While their first impression failed to connect with listeners in the U.K., it fit perfectly with the funk phenomenon surging in the States, shooting to No. 22 on the U.S. R&B chart and cracking the Top 50 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Before long, Cymande found themselves performing to sold-out arenas as support for Al Green at the height of his power. An electrifying stateside sprint landed the group dates with Kool & The Gang and Patti LaBelle, a spot on Soul Train and a historic bill as the first British band to play the Apollo Theater. Backstage along the way, Patterson and Scipio feverishly penned 1973’s Second Time Around, recorded with Schroeder on a whistle-stop in London before another U.S. headlining run. Shortly after cutting 1974’s Promised Heights in Chicago, Cymande returned home, where a total void of airplay or commercial interest stopped them dead in their tracks.
“There was nothing going on in the U.K. before we went to the States and nothing changed while we were away,” Scipio shares. “Had we been a typical English band who’d garnered that kind of interest in the States, there’s no way that would not have filtered back to the U.K. media.”
“I used to say—and I don’t say it now because I’ve bored myself saying it—but the music industry had very little time for Black music and even less time for Black musicians,” Patterson echoes.
“Having reached the level that we had in the U.S., we didn’t want to go back to our home territory and go back to where we were before,” Scipio reflects. “What can I say? It was kind of demeaning in a way to continue doing that. So we said, ‘Listen, let’s take a break—we’ll see if things change a little bit within a year or two.’”
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In the late ‘80s, the next generation found their own sound by cutting and mixing those that preceded them. With the advent of sampling, architects of the new guard invoked Cymande’s voice from the bargain bin to provide the vernacular for early hip-hop and house. The rubbery basslines and hypnotic guitar of “Bra,” “Dove” and “Brothers on the Slide” bolster cuts by De La Soul, the Fugees, Wu-Tang Clan, Gang Starr, James Brown, EPMD, Def Jef, the Sugarhill Gang, MF Doom and as many as 150 more—earning Cymande a reputation as your-favorite-artist’s-favorite artist and one of the most heavily sampled British bands ever.
By the time that their star was rising again, Patterson and Scipio were leading new lives as legal practitioners in the Caribbean. Scipio’s children cued him to the renewed interest in Cymande’s catalog, which soon evolved into a fundamental, global reappraisal of the band’s legacy, and the core duo began to explore the possibility of a revival.
In 2015, original bandmates Patterson, Scipio, Gonsales, drummer Sam Kelly and saxophonists Derek Gibbs and Mike Rose reconnected with Schroeder for A Simple Act of Faith, a limited release that quietly refined their style for a new era and added keyboardist Adrian Reid. That uncorked creative fervor launched the group into a 2016 world tour—captured in the new documentary Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande—and scattered stops on both sides of the pond since. Now, Cymande have fully realized their return with Renascence, which picks up where they left off 50 years ago and ushers in a new golden age.
Patterson and Scipio, both now 75 years old, are the only original members on the new project. They’re joined by Reid and fellow 10-year contributing vocalist Ray Simpson, plus five newcomers—all of whom discovered the band long before supporting its second act. Though the cast has changed, Cymande’s unbounded manner abides throughout 10 tracks that boldly branch out from their earlier offerings.
“The music is much the same in terms of its breadth and creativity,” Patterson details. “Our approach is to be original and impossible to squeeze into any particular genre, and we’ve been fortunate with that.”
“Even though we’d ceased playing music for a livelihood for quite a few years, Patrick and I still continued writing and sharing ideas,” Scipio says of the diverse and often surprising project’s development. “If I get an idea, I put it down roughly and then I send it to Patrick, and vice versa. A lot of the songs on the new album were within our catalog of ideas, so it was a matter of simply going through and identifying what would best reflect where we are today, and where our fans would expect us to be as a band that had grown over time.”
The lively horn-powered get-down of “Sweeden” dates back to the late ‘70s and could pass for a lost B-side from the band’s debut. “One Way,” a tender torch song featuring Celeste, was written on the spot with the vocalist and includes unprecedented string accompaniment. Cymande’s social purpose resounds across the project, and their resistance through peace, love and unity is particularly profound in the hip-hop-influenced “How We Roll,” for which Jazzie B raps about “the vibrations of our souls/ Ever living on within the young and the old as we rise/ Living together as one.”
Altogether, Renascence represents much more than a second bite at the apple—it’s a revelation of the underlying essence that makes Cymande just as vital today as they were in the beginning. On their latest record and their first alike, the ensemble’s fearlessly innovative music intones the wisdom to be found in heritage, the revolutionary potential of creativity and the brilliance that can bloom from originality, tenacity and patience. For Patterson and Scipio, these virtues have burgeoned into their long-overdue recognition as unparalleled trailblazers, guaranteeing esteem from further generations of fans to come. In another 50 years, it would still be well worth the wait.
“It’s refreshing that, when the guys of the ‘80s and ‘90s wanted to express their experience, they went back and sourced our material from the ‘70s,” Scipio reflects on Cymande’s legacy and route to renewal. “That shows the timelessness of the music, but it also shows that what we were speaking to in the ‘70s was still very much there for the younger generation.”
“It’s funny that, in a sense, Steve and I in Cymande are communicating something that was communicated to us from the generation before,” Patterson replies. “It’s about ambition and aspiration—striving for excellence and representing your community. There’s nothing new about it, really; different lips speak it, but the sentiment is the same, and our community has been consistent with that. Don’t bend, don’t bow and do your thing to the best of your ability. Those messages hopefully will last forever.”
