Demon Fuzz, maravilloso grupo neցro de afro-rock progresivo.Entrevista a Paddy Corea, fotos muy rara

Solo una cosa primero escuchen algo de sus 2 albums,consiganlo y mas adelante comentamos el album los que queramos.

No hay mejor y mas completa informacion sobre ese grupo en toda la red, lo pongo aqui completo ( como gran excepcion ) y con el sitio de donde lo saco:

ROUGH DRAFT - Paddy Corea Interview (Unpublished Work, 2006)

ROUGH DRAFT - Paddy Corea Interview (Unpublished Work, 2006)

PADDY COREA INTERVIEW (UNFINISHED WORK)

INTRODUCTION

Some of you that have hung around this forum for a number of years may recall a thread regarding the Demon Fuzz albums in which John Stapleton asked me for the liner notes of the second (rare) Demon Fuzz album, entitled "Roots & Offshoots". No sooner had I posted up the information than an irate Paddy Corea, the founder of Demon Fuzz, appeared online and accused me of pirating his records..! I quickly calmed Paddy down, explained that I had a copy of the album and was just sharing the liner notes with a friend online and he and I started over, enjoying a more civilised dialogue over the coming months.

We discussed his upbringing, his first bands in England and I even attempted to persuade him to allow Licorice Soul to reissue his work. He had plans to reissue the albums himself; plans that I still don't know to this day whether they came to fruition or not (I've not checked to be truthful). We kept in touch by email on a weekly basis, Paddy telling me a little more of his story each and every time he contacted me. I think the last email I received from him was in early 2007 when he sent me some photographs he had taken during James Brown's memorial service at the Harlem Apollo.

After that, we lost contact - just at the point when we were starting to discuss the bands he played in when first in the UK. We never got around to discussing Demon Fuzz, but I recently rediscovered the pictures he sent me and so wanted to share them with you all.




INTERVIEW

Note:- this is a rough tras*cript and hasn't been altered from it's original form.

As far as pedigree is concerned it’s very interesting. I have a couple of legends in my ancestry, first the legendary Frederick James Snagg my great grandfather inherited Canouan Island (in the Grenadines) his brother was Sir William Snagg, the Chief Justice of Guyana (I think). We were both born on this island. Frederick Snagg built a small stone church to get married to Miss Pinkie (the daughter of ex slaves) she was about 18 and he was around 40. From what I know they had 3 children but he had others. The church still stands but there is a resort where his home was and leased to some mafia investors and Donald Trump. His son, St Hillary (St Hill for short) is my grandfather; he was an early 20th century smuggler with his own schooner running contraband from Trinidad, Venezuela, Cuba, Santo Domingo and all the other islands in the southern Caribbean. He died at sea and the British colonial authorities buried him in Mucorapo cemetery in Port of Spain and didn’t provide the family with info or records. His ship was registered in Port of Spain Trinidad. My mom is one of his daughters and my grandmother was the grand daughter of African slaves (from which I take my heritage. She remains a very popular lady in Canouan even 45 years after her death.

On my father's side my great grandfather was from a family of illiterate Portuguese indentured labourers from Madeira who were encouraged by the British to come to St Vincent with a promise of work for 10 years and then be rewarded with land after that - the same promise the British made to the Madras Indians who they encouraged to come to Guyana and Trinidad to work in the sugar plantations. Great grandfather was Joaquin Corea, his son Manuel Corea became the richest man in St Vincent by early 1900's. My father Adolphus was one of 3 or 4 illegitimate children Manuel had.

My father’s mother was one of the last yellow caribs of St Vincent that was not killed off or sent into exile in Raottan island of Belize after 1795 when the carib war ended and the chief Joseph Chatewa was tricked into a conference and murdered by the British. She didn’t speak much English, she spoke French and carib (garifuna) language. Today the carib descendants (garifuna) are the largest and most important group in Belize and other Central American Caribbean countries.

I was born in St Vincent (West Indies) schooled and grew up there, came to London in 1960. First musical influences were the string bands that roamed the streets and kept you awake all night during the Christmas season in St Vincent. They had goat skin drums of all types and sizes, guitars, violins, quatro's, banjo's iron (any metal with a ring beaten with another piece of metal (we still use it in the steel bands) shack shack (maracas) some even had saws played with a violin bow. After that I played around with grannies’ (my adopted grand mother) piano.

My father gave me a 1-way air ticket to England when everybody was travelling by boat and having a grand time. My first experience in London was getting lost on the underground the first day I arrived at Victoria. My cousin and I came from Gatwick airport by train and I was flabbergasted at seeing row after row of houses so tightly packed with chimneys and naively asked a priest if they were all factories, he scoffed at my stupidity (but I genuinely didn’t know any better). When we got to Victoria we went downstairs to the Circle Line (I think) and I jumped on to the first train - my first train ride. My cousin stayed on the platform trying to ascertain that it was the right train and of course the doors closed automatically (that was a big deal and I was impressed). I got carted off on the train and he was on the platform with a briefcase with both our documents. Here I was in London literally stranded with no passport, no documents no nothing not even an address..!

I made my way to Kings Cross on the advice of the station man and was encouraged to talk with the station master because the only address I could remember was my god father who lived in Stoke Newington - Lordship Lane I think. I had a few pounds in my pocket and the station master kindly put me in a taxi (my first London taxi ride) to Stoke Newington I think the date was Sunday July 21st 1960 (not sure of actual date but it was the 3rd Sunday in July 1960.

No formal musical education. At 12 I started playing quatro (tenor guitar with 4 strings) and at 14 I was introduced formally to steel pan by a neighbour friend who "sold" me my first steel pan and instructed me on how to make, tune and play these drums. I did a BBC documentary in 1962 or 63 for The Five O’clock Club on how the steel pan is made from the raw drum to the sinking (stretching) the surface in a concave, then grooving the notes to the right size, burning the drum to change the molecules of the metal to what’s required and then the tuning of the instrument and playing. They filmed me at 50 Cazenove Road in Stoke Newington.

About that time 1963 or so, I picked up an alto sax borrowed from a friend and then bought it from him. Two or three years later I was playing with a ska (blue beat) band in Clapton E5.

Some of the earliest musicians who impressed me was actually on the radio. Nobody had TV in those days back in the late 40's and 50's. John Buddy Williams who blended jazz and calypso (Trinidad) Johnny Gomez who played latin-tinged calypso at the Normandie Hotel (Trinidad) Desmond Durham orchestra (from Trinidad but picked up on the radio). Then there were local musicians in St Vincent, the Mackintosh Brothers Orchestra who played American standards in calypso and latin tempo...

Then there was a St Vincent legend who taught the British what jazz is all about. The mighty mighty SHAKE KEANE.(see shake keane /joe harriot quinted/quatet, INDO JAZZ fusions etc etc) when I came to London Shake was my musical mentor. I ran into him at the Flamingo in Wardour St. His older sister and my mom were best friends. He died recently on his way to Norway to do radio (poetry and jazz) with his old friend Oslo broadcaster Eryk Bye. Shake wrote poetry in the colloquial form and short stories. He was a BBC broadcaster in the 50's (Valerie Wilmer the London author, could give you lots of info on him). Then of course the legendary steel bands of the early days especially INVADERS (the first steelband thanks to Elli Manette who invented the first real pan (not spree simon as popular belief).

Manette is alive and living in Florida. He single handed invented the steel pan. Nobody else. Contrary to popular belief, INVADERS played classical music in calypso style and was excellent at it. They are still around at the same address on Tragarete Road in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad.

I didn’t get turned on to jazz and the wider musical forms till I came to London. The earliest band was at St Vincent Boys Grammar School. I played steel pan and the other guys played regular instruments. Then I formed my own steelband PAN INVADERS and challenged all the big guns and beat them by carnival time 1959 and 1960.

The first band in London that I was good enough to play sax with was Ickford Tomaz and his Latin American jazz band.

---------- Post added 12-sep-2013 at 21:45 ----------



As young West Indian immigrant to England in 1960, I opened a Pandora’s box of experiences. I would think that all of us new arrivals were ignorant to some degree as to what to expect and how to cope with it. I would add that I was starry eyed, naive and open to anything. I didn’t know what racism was, I didn’t know that life in London would be sooooo drastically different from the comfortable sheltered life I had at home on the little rock. I didn’t know in detail that I would have to fend for myself completely, includes cooking, washing, earning a living and handling my four pounds a week frugally, keeping myself in every which way. I didn’t know that I would have to live in a single room and share kitchen and bathroom with others having left a full house with all mod cons at home. I had never done any of this before.

I didn’t know what to expect at work. I didn’t know that the work place was soooo regimented and organised, that you couldn’t take a break whenever you wanted or that your life was in the hands of your immediate boss who spoke to you as if you were shit. I couldn’t come to terms with that. I was fired from my first job at SHERRY’S WHARF (in Homerton, Hackney) when I grabbed the foreman by his lapels and shock the shit out of him and when I let go he fell to the ground.

He fired me immediately but he was riding my back for the last few weeks that I was there and I had obliquely threatened him. Anyhow because of his constant picking on me and the fact that I reported it to the union, I was re hired in 3 days but moved out of the machine shop and put in the boiler room as a stoker. Here I had a shocking experience or revelation if you like. I found out the chief stoker couldn’t read. This was a big shock to me. Here I am in the “mother country” where the streets were supposed to be paved with gold and there were Lords and Ladies & Royalty and an Englishman can’t read. That was a hell of a shock but we became friends and he hipped me to the workings of the factory environment (the do’s and don’ts of the working class).

I remember the ads in the smoke shops and corner stores “ROOMS TO LET, SORRY NO IRISH, NO DOGS, NO COLOUREDS.” I was so ignorant and naive that it had to be explained to me.
It was also exciting in sooo many ways. I met people from all parts of the Commonwealth and the world, all religions, colours, types, creeds, nationalities, languages and even racists. I fought with one in Finsbury park station train mens lunchroom, I jumped over the table to beat his ass because of a racist remark he made to me, His name was Fowler.

I was the youngest driver on the London tras*port Underground system in those days. There were about 8 or 10 black drivers then. After I left London tras*port I used to get thrown off the bus with my baritone sax because it was so big, so I developed a system of riding free. I would get on the bus at Manor House and ask the conductor (whenever he got to me) if this bus is going to Nags Head he would be polite and tell me that I was going in the wrong direction, so I get off and do the same thing next bus. I would get home to Stamford hill in 2 attempts.

London was an education every day. I read the Guardian and once in a while The Times but on Sundays it was News of the World for all the gossip and kinky stuff. I had never been to a real museum until I came to London, never been to a real club or theatre, never had a ride on a train, or a bus for that matter, never saw a lake, or a river as big and wide as the Thames, never saw a castle or palace, and the (familiar) names I had only read about, Piccadilly, Oxford St, Pall Mall, Charing Cross, Covent Garden, Big Ben, & Parliament, Tower of London and so many others. It was a crucible of excitement and learning for me. This helped to offset the pain of being alone and lonely and far from home especially having to rely on only myself for myself - that’s a big deal when you’re on your own in a strange land. But it worked out all right and my mom and dad were 100% right to let me come travel to England.

By 1966 new years day I married Patricia Carolyn relleniton. We had a daughter 6 months earlier, Juanita Corea – she is now is the US army in Iraq. Around this time I joined a new band called Mood Indigo and our singer was David Essex. All this was while still working for Cable and Wireless.


Nice band, great little band, we were doing blues/rock long before any others and doing it good. I still keep in touch with David sometimes and with Del Paramor the other horn player who now lives in Augsburg Germany.


I then moved to Charlton in South London, and later joined Blue Rivers and the Maroons (end of 1966). Blue Rivers still sings and is living in Switzerland. While with Blue Rivers I did a lot of recording sessions for all and sundry - Desmond Dekker, Bruce Ruffin, Sugar & Dandy, Root & Jenny Jackson, The Tonics, Eddie Grant (as Equals), Psycho & the Caribs, The Pioneers and lots of others. I was a great soloist...


---------- Post added 12-sep-2013 at 21:49 ----------

Pondre 1 tema, atencion a partir del minuto 4 mas o menos:
Demon Fuzz - Hymn To Mother Earth - 1970 - YouTube

Las fotos son raras, en cuanto a la musica si te gusta la progresiva mezclada con afro-rock ( no afrobeat ) pues estaras en tu salsa, a mi me parecen una maravilla.
Al final de post anterior pongo enlace de youtube, si te tomas la molestia veras como suenan.

Y para que te retuerzas aun mas ( no es por hacer propaganda, es mas comento que el segundo album unicamente se puede conseguir sin pasar por caja ,de forma fiable en un blogspot de reggae, musica que en general me cansa, ahi metieron su segundo album ), ahi va mas:

Wax Poetics » Demon Fuzz

Articles
Demon Fuzz

by Matthew Court


Photo courtesy of Paddy Corea

Stylistically, Demon Fuzz’s single album, 1970’s Afreaka!, is hard to pin down. But then, I guess that’s the point. Demon Fuzz went out of their way to keep people guessing; at gigs, they’d let people assume they were a reggae band, only to launch into some African-influenced jazz/rock number. Jaws hit the floor and feet started tapping. “We were different, totally different,” says Demon Fuzz trombonist Clarance Crosdale.

Demon Fuzz was a group of seven young musicians who came together after emigrating to London in the early 1960s. Since 1948, the British government had been encouraging people in the Commonwealth to settle in England, in hopes of replenishing that country’s war-depleted work population; a happy by-product was that before long, many a West Indian riddim could be heard emanating from the clubs and street corners in big cities like Birmingham and London. British kids soon had a different beat to shuffle to. Of course, these times weren’t without their problems: in 1958, just three years before Demon Fuzz members (and brothers) Winston Joseph and Blue Rivers arrived in England, London’s Notting Hill neighborhood had erupted in race riots.

But back to the music.

Paddy Corea arrived in London in 1963, and soon took up playing the tenor saxophone—his weapon of choice for irking neighbors. One day, he answered a want ad Winston had placed in NME, the British music magazine that many budding musicians bought in order to scour the classifieds. Corea auditioned, and Winston and Rivers recruited the saxophonist for their band. Organist Ray Rhoden joined up shortly after, and he brought in his good friend Clarance, a Jamaican musician who had studied trombone with Rico Rodriguez. A second saxophonist came on-board, and they began performing as Blue Rivers and the Maroons.

“[We] didn’t play only ska, we were a raw soul band,” explains Corea in an interview with Koldo Barroso for themarqueeclub.net. “Not the Motown soft string soul that BBC peddled. We did a lot of material from the small labels of the South. The kids from out of town were a bit confused. They were looking for the stuff they heard on BBC radio, and we didn’t play that. Rivers prided himself in trying not to be like the rest. At that time in London, every Black man who had a voice wanted to be a ‘soul’ singer, and very few of them could cut it.”

Every weekend, the Maroons would perform to dapper-looking crowds at clubs like the Roaring Twenties, and the Q Club, owned by Count Suckle, the West Indian DJ who possessed the deadliest sound system outside of Kingston. “We used to get a lot of write-ups in the West Indian press,” says Crosdale proudly. “We were sort of the best band around really.”

“Ziggy [Jackson, the band’s manager] had some contacts, and he booked just about every town hall in London,” remembers Winston. In 1968, Ziggy acquired some time at Regent Sound, a room on Denmark Street that had been the studio of choice for the Rolling Stones to record their first record in 1964. The session resulted in the LP Blue Beat in My Soul.

But barely two years after recording Blue Beat, the Maroons would part company with Rivers, and take a left turn in style and attitude. Paddy Corea reflects on what prompted the decision to move away from their ska and soul roots.

“It was while in jovenlandéscco that my idea for a different kind of band and a different kind of music was born,” says Corea. “I was at this time exposed to a new kind of music that didn’t have a Western European scale. I learnt the Sufi Arabic scale and the pentatonic scale there. I heard all these tribal musicians from the interior playing various drums, reed instruments, and a kora, which is a stringed instrument with a calabash as a resonator. These chaps would play the hell out of this thing, as good as a Yehudi Menuhin. All this synthesized into what influenced me to try a different approach to my music. Some of the members of the Maroons understood and appreciated my ideas, and were thinking of similar things, so we formed Demon Fuzz on our return to the UK.”

“I remember the last gig we did as the Maroons was in Huddersfield,” recalls Crosdale. “We decided we didn’t want to just keep playing people’s music. In fact, we had a job to go to the Star-Club in Hamburg. That’s where everybody went. But when they said you had to do seven half hour sessions, I was… [smiles and shakes head] So we decided we’d just break ways. [Rivers] and the [second] sax player stayed together, we went as Demon Fuzz. We spent about two or three months rehearsing. We didn’t play [live] for that time.” During this period, the group looked for a vocalist to replace Rivers and happened upon Smokey Adams, who was “playing in a second-rate R&B band in Shepherd’s Bush,” according to Corea.
“Its got two meanings,” Crosdale explains when asked about the group’s name. “Devil’s children or bad policemen.” The devil’s children rehearsed in the basement of a record shop in West London, where they began tackling the songs of the day, like “The Weight,” “I Put a Spell on You,” and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

“When we first formed Demon Fuzz, we did not have a clear-cut direction,” says Winston. “We were just feeling our way, and we selected a few songs by well known artists that appealed to us, and we put a new spin on them. It was not until I started coming up with some ideas that we started to find some kind of direction which we all built on.”

“We didn’t just want to do run-of-the-mill stuff, and of course it gives you much more of a challenge musically,” added Crosdale. “Winston and Ray did a lot of the writing. We did a couple of songs. ‘Past, Present, and Future,’ the band did that. Paddy did the arrangements. A lot of it was the band sort of cooperating, putting ideas together. I’ll tell a band that inspired us: Blood, Sweat & Tears.”

By 1970, racism in the UK was less obvious, but still clear and present in the music industry. “There was and probably still is difference based on race in the music business in England,” says Corea. “It wasn’t blatant but it was there. Black bands were paid less by club owners and were asked to work twice as long. We found that local Black musicians in England at that time were not taken seriously and just simply taken for granted. We wanted to change the style, sound, image, and attitude of Black music and Black musicians in England.”

Thankfully, there was John Peel, a forward-looking DJ at the BBC. “We did his Sunday, repeated Wednesday [show],” recalls Crosdale. “We played lived at the Paris Studios. We played about four numbers. I think we played ‘I Put a Spell On You.’ I remember when we did the Hollywood Festival, [Peel] used to write for the Melody Maker, or one of those. I used to have the article, and he said, ‘Superb, superb, superb.’ Now if John Peel says that…”
Sometime in 1970, using the proceeds from their various gigs, the group paid for studio time and recorded some music. “We did a demo which we paid for, and that connected with Dawn [Records],” remembers Crosdale. “We went in a studio in Morden, and the engineer was very good.”

When asked about what became of the demo, Crosdale shrugs. “I don’t know if Paddy’s got it, or Winston’s got it,” says Crosdale. “Paddy’s got most of the stuff.”

Listening to the demo, Dawn Records producer Barry Murray liked what he heard, or at least he considered Demon Fuzz a good bet for competing against EMI and Phonogram, who had also recently stuck their fingers into the progressive pie. He took the group into Pye Studios in Marble Arch in September 1970. “[The recording] took a week,” says Crosdale. “We were doing a long time in the studio. Some days we’d get there at about ten o’clock and sometimes be there ’til two the next morning.”

“When Demon Fuzz recorded Afreaka!, it is my humble opinion that the record producer, Barry Murray, did not have a thorough understanding of the musical direction that we were taking as a band,” says Winston. “We were up against a large, well-known, well-established company who were spending the money for the production of the LP and we were expected to just obey the instructions of the producer that they were paying to produce the record. We had very little say, if any at all in the matter.”
“We were a lot better then that!” Crosdale says, referring to the music on Afreaka!. “Barry Murray, on one of the tracks, he left the organ out! How he forgot the organ on a track, I don’t know. When we played [the record], we listened to it, and all of a sudden, ‘Well, where’s the organ in that track?!’”

“We were not happy with the final result,” confirms Winston, “but there was nothing that we could do about it. We just had to live with it.”

Sadly, it seems that Winston, Corea, and Crosdale view Afreaka! with some disappointment; they see it as a poor reflection of the band that hooked audiences in the basement clubs of Soho and beyond. “Demon Fuzz live had a superior tonal quality to what you hear on the LP,” says Corea. “And add to that we had a majestic presence on stage. That’s why we were misdiagnosed as being arrogant. It was the aura of our confidence, individual and collective. We were not commercially successful via the recording, but the live band was always a hit.

“We did a lot of universities and technical colleges,” says Crosdale. “Southampton, Cambridge, Oxford. They sort of understood the music. Whereas if you went to some social clubs, they didn’t really get it. Billy Preston used to come and jam with us. A lot of them artists from the states, when they finished their gigs they used to go down to the Q. Billy Preston, Diana Ross’s drummer, all them used to come and you play there and they come and jam with you. The Q, a lot of big names used to come down there. We used to do Ronnie Scott’s upstairs a lot, too.”
Getting themselves to gigs was no small antiestéticat, however. The suspension of their modest tour bus would groan as it hauled seven musicians and their plethora of instruments up and down England’s highways and city roads. On one occasion, they were stopped by the police on suspicion of being illegal immigrants; NME ran the predictable headline of “Fuzz Meets the Fuzz.”

Demon Fuzz’s time was short, and by 1972, cracks had developed in their once-concrete bond, and they would soon call it quits. “We had our disagreements, and Paddy left,” recalls Crosdale. “Paddy said, ‘That’s it.’ We carried on a bit, but it wasn’t the same, so we just disbanded. It’s all water under the bridge now.” Afreaka! was reissued on the Castle Music label in 2005, with an additional three tracks.