Word: concert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...manifest at the concert, the bitterness in Jimmy Cliff was not. A complete song from his latest album, for example, is devoted to hypocrites...
...group, now older, better-dressed, better-behaved, still predominately white, that came to Jimmy Cliff's first Boston concert. They were rewarded with a great performance. From his first appearance on stage, Jimmy Cliff showed his pleasure to be finally singing in Boston, long an isolated stronghold of reggae sentiment in this country. Bounding about the stage like Mosca, brandishing the screaming-white-starred shirt made famous in his Cambridge cult film, The Harder They Come, dancing and sliding in eels of black wire, he flung himself into his music with unabashed fervor...
...both the performers and the audience, the show retained its tightness and musical virtuousity. The numbers were delivered in fast sequence. The harmony was close and rhythm exact, the sound was solid and pure, and the show was unencumbered by excesses of lightsmanship. The first half of the concert was mostly composed of tunes from Jimmy Cliff's two albums, The Harder They Come and Unlimited. While the second half ran through his just-released album, Follow My Mind. For its first encore the band played Under the Sun, Moon and Stars, and the concert ended on Jimmy Cliff...
...Sixty percent of reggae is frustration of oppressed people," Jimmy Cliff told Andrew Kopkind of The Real Paper in 1973. "Forty percent is fantasy." Fantasy prevailed last Saturday night; little frustration showed. "We come from Jamaica with the message of peace and love," Jimmy Cliff announced during the concert, but such messages sound simple when separated from their roots. Reggae is street music from the West Kingston slum, Trenchtown, and springs from the mass of poor, disenfranchised black Jamaicans. On the one hand reggae is a transcendent music. On the other it is an extremely bitter and very political expression...
...THIS sense of evil in the world, and the ultimate triumph over it, that gives Jimmy Cliff's music its vitality. This moral struggle between right and wrong, the forces of oppression and freedom, was missing from last Saturday's concert. Perhaps Jimmy Cliff was too happy a man to sing pain. A man who started his career back in 1962 and is just now cresting as a star, certainly deserves happiness. But most probably the crowd was too happy--happy getting it's money's worth from good music--to listen to pain and torment. In any case...