sons do their father proud

August 15, 2004 performance, by Dave Conlin Read

see more photos here

Toots and the Maytals
Berkshire Music Glen at Bousquet
photo © Cheryl Murray

Berkshire Music Glen's initial season came to a throbbing - earth-shaking - close Sunday August 15 when the Bob Marley Roots Rock Reggae Festival 2004 put on a six hour show at Bousquet Ski Area in Pittsfield. Headlined by five sons of Bob Marley, who died of cancer in 1981, the festival also featured Toots and the Maytals, plus Nappy Roots, Looner, and Slightly Stoopid.

Toots and the Maytals, whose 1968 single, "Do the Reggay" is credited with coining the term reggae, played a 75 minute set that included a surprisingly groovy version of John Denver's "Country Road" and a long call and response number where Toots Hibbert divided the audience into four parts and then displayed his amazing vocal range by leading into each of the audience groups in various personae, sounding once like Billie Holliday and then like Aretha Franklin.

Hibbert danced and strolled thoughout his set and never took his eyes off the wildly enthusiastic audience, which included many who could've seen him perform, along with Bob Marley and the Wailers and Jimmy Cliff at nearby Lenox's legendary Music Inn thirty years earlier. He led his band off stage to a recording of The Stars Spangled Banner.

Toots and the Maytals
Berkshire Music Glen at Bousquet
photo © Cheryl Murray

The hip hop sextet Nappy Roots took the stage next, informing the crowd that it's Nappy Hour, a good part of which was taken to tell about the group's roots and trips - Louisville, Kentucky and Baghdad, Iraq (with the U.S.O.). This was our first exposure to the genre, of which Ky-Mani Marley is a celebrated practioner, and it inspired us to assess the sound system and do a little sight-seeing by meandering up the ski slope several hundred yards from the stage (maybe a quarter mile), where the sound was clear, if the diction wasn't, and the view of Mt. Greylock grand.

The Marley Brothers, Ziggy, Damian, Stephen, Ky-mani and Julian, together as a band for the first time on this tour, closed the show with an 80 minute set that enraptured the audience. Their set was made up of faithful - some nearly exact - renditions of their father's greatest hits, including "Roots, Rock, Reggae," "Kaya," "Is This Love?," and the appropriate finale "Exodus."

The sons did their father proud, making his music as fresh and uplifting today as it was when he introduced it to an earlier generation, which failed to accomplish much in the way of breaking down oppression, establishing the rule of equality, wiping away transgression, or setting the captives free, as "Exodus" would have it.