Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin was born June 19, 1932 and grew up in the small town of Robin’s Hall in the Parish of Manchester, a rural community in the middle of Jamaica. Music has always claimed a special place in the island's culture, and Ranglin’s destiny was set from an early age when two of his uncles showed him the rudiments of playing the guitar. When they discovered just how good the young boy was, they bought him a ukulele.
Ranglin learned how to play by imitating his uncles, but he was soon to be influenced by the recordings of the great American jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. Living in rural Jamaica, however, inhibited the boy’s ambitions, which, even at the age of fourteen, were focused on music. He moved to Kingston – the country’s capital – ostensibly to finish his studies at Bodmin College, but very high on Ranglin’s agenda was to seriously study the guitar; something not among the school’s priorities.
His lessons came from guitar books and late-night sessions watching the Jamaican dance bands of the time: he was particularly influenced by Cecil Houdini, an unrecorded local musician. By the time he was sixteen years old, Ranglin was acknowledged as the rising young talent in the city. In 1948 he joined his first group, the Val Bennett Orchestra, playing in local hotels. Such was Ranglin’s burgeoning reputation that he soon came to the attention of rival dance bands and, by the early-Fifties, he was a member of Jamaica’s best-known group, the Eric Deans Orchestra, touring the Caribbean.
The big bands gave Ranglin the hugely beneficial experience of learning how to orchestrate and arrange. The typical repertoire of the day included tunes by Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington, together with Cuban music and the hot Broadway show songs. The constant tours gave Ranglin a wider vision, meeting musicians from other traditions. Once, for instance, when he was working in Nassau, his performance was heard by Les Paul, who gave Ranglin a guitar in admiration of his talents.
It was, however, back in Jamaica that Ernest’s career was transformed by a chance meeting. In 1958 Ranglin was leading his own quintet when, at one engagement at the Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay, he met a young would-be record producer called Chris Blackwell.
Impressed by Ranglin’s extraordinary talents, Blackwell offered him the chance to make a record. The album, the first release for Island records, featured a pianist called Lance Heywood on one side with Ernest Ranglin on the other – the start of a long association between Ranglin and Blackwell.
By the following year, 1959, Jamaican music was in a state of flux, the traditional mento was being superseded by a tough urban sound modelled on American R&B. As part of bassist Cluett Johnson’s Blues Blasters, Ranglin recorded several instrumentals for producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd at Federal Studios – the only real studio facility on the island where Australian sound engineer Graeme Goodall was the man at the controls. Among these were a tune credited to pianist Theophilus Beckford called Easy Snappin’and another Shuffling Jug by Clue J & His Blues Blasters – widely regarded now as the first recorded examples of Ska. Ska was a dancefloor phenomenon and became the bedrock of Jamaican popular music, leading to rocksteady, reggae, and all the subsequent musical innovations the island has brought to the world.
Ranglin’s fluent and versatile guitar style, coupled with his arrangement skills, meant he was in constant demand right through the ska era. In 1964 Chris Blackwell brought a young singer called Millie Small and Ranglin to London – he had plans to make a hit record. Ernest played guitar and arranged the session which produced My Boy Lollipop which, in the spring of that year, reached number two in the UK chart. It went on to become a worldwide hit, the first time ska had infiltrated into the vocabulary of pop music.
Ranglin, by this stage, was a colossus on the Jamaican recording scene and when he would return to the island he was in high demand as a session man. He was present at Bob Marley’s first recording session and then there were hit records with the likes of the Ethiopians, the Melodians (Rivers Of Babylon), the Paragons, Toots and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff.
Jamaican styles are not the only weapon in Ernest Ranglin’s arsenal. In 1964 Ranglin went to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London and so impressed the owner that he became resident guitarist for some 9 months. His jazz recordings in the 60s and 70s include The Jamaican Jazz Crusaders with Roy “Bubbles” Burrowes, Ranglypso and Now is the Time for MPS and Guitar in Ernest, Wranglin and Reflections for Island Records.
Since the 90s, Ranglin has recorded prolifically. In 1996 Below The Bassline with Idris Muhammad, Ira Coleman, Monty Alexander and Roland Alphonso was a popular and critical success on Island Record’s Jamaica Jazz offshoot. Since a 1970s visit to Senegal with Jimmy Cliff, Ranglin has been keen to explore African music and he recorded with Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen (Modern Answers To Old Problems, Telarc 2000) and Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal (In Search Of The Lost Riddim, Palm 1998). In 2004 he collaborated with long-time musical partner Monty Alexander on an album called Rocksteady which he toured to Australia, playing incredible celebratory shows at the Cockatoo Island Festival, East Coast Blues and Roots Festival and The Basement where he returns on Sunday the 9th of December.
People who think that Jamaica is only about reggae music have only experienced Jamaica from the ’70s, Ranglin says. As a young boy in the ’40s, I heard the great musicians of Jamaica and musicians from all over the world at a place in Kingston called the Colony Club, especially Americans and artists from Cuba. The [Jamaican] musicians had to be versatile. We played mento and calypso, which is our music, but we also played songs from Broadway musicals and swing music, and when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie came along, which was the greatest time of my life, we played bebop. – Down Beat, 2004
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