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Interview with Ibo.
Kwame Dawes Let me start with the most obvious question: Ibo. Where did that name come from?
Ibo Cooper I got the nickname right as I started with Inner Circle, just after I left high school, because of the fighting in Nigeria. I was skinny, and the Biafran War had pictures of starving children, and you know how Jamaicans tease and rib about things. It became a name because of the Ibos in Nigeria.
KD You are currently in Runaway Bay teaching at a residential conference for Caribbean musicians. This teaching has become a part of your new life—training artists, traveling around talking about the music business, passing your knowledge on to others. Teaching is a passion for you, isn’t it?
IC I grew up in a family of teachers, and many of the people I admire were teachers. This business of passing things on to others is something I have developed a passion for. Most of the time I am asked to come in because I am one of the few musicians who bridged the gap between formal training—that is, western European music—and the oral tradition in Jamaica. I have never held any preference for one side or the other. I have always recognized the power of the informal music that became reggae.
KD Would you prefer to be remembered as Ibo Cooper, Third World, or Ibo Cooper, teacher?
IC The Third World thing is not going to go away anytime soon. And I wouldn’t want it to go away—that is a quarter century of my life in which I made a great impact on the world, as a vocalist and musician and, in a way, bandleader. But the youths whom I have come in contact with over the last four years have become family, like my children. And they have never seen me perform with the group, except on video. So the interaction is quite different, but we remember the efforts to get good grades in order to get school fees and to get a gig here and a gig there, and we become connected. These are especially the music students at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. I went there part-time at first and started a popular music ensemble, teaching how to play as a band. Then I came aboard full-time as head of the Caribbean, Latin American and jazz department, which is now called Popular Music Studies.
KD You came into reggae music at a time when the mandate was at once to entertain and to teach. The prophet was a standard persona in roots reggae music. Were you always comfortable with that role and with the pressures of being a teacher in that way?
IC Inner Circle was very much a pop band playing Top 40. The stress was more on entertainment than on message. With Third World our dissatisfaction with the Top 40 run was the catalyst. We wanted to be innovative, and this manifested itself first in the form of songwriting, but not necessarily message songwriting. We did not start out to be a reggae band in the purest sense. We played a lot of soul, R&B and funk. We thought it would be versatile of us to be able to do it all. Not out of a disregard for reggae, which was from our culture. The first time it ever hit me that bands specialized was when we went to England in 1975. A journalist, a white man, asked us when we were going to become a reggae band. That’s when it occurred to me that in those countries you were either this or that. I always thought that this was narrow thinking, and I always had a problem with people trying to narrow my intelligence. Actually, an African American who later managed Third World was surprised when he saw me playing in a jazz band. And last week at a concert, after I did an up-tempo blues bit one of the teachers said they did not know that I played jazz so well. I notice that the English and Americans do not have a problem with their people being versatile. Sting plays jazz, reggae, anything he wants to play. Yet when we came from the Caribbean they wanted us to be narrow. My education was quite broad. We were playing everything from Beethoven and Brahms to Bob, Sparrow, Latin. We were reading Shakespeare, we were reading the Jamaican poet and impresario Miss Lou. But even then the fact that we had received an education seemed to work against us, because there was always the stereotype of a Jamaican from the ghetto who was a bad man struggling to make it, and this music was just his or her way out of poverty. The unfortunate thing was that people started to think we were uneducated, and I am not even talking about formal education. I had a friend who was a jazz dj who was respectful in general, but one day I was making a quip and I misspelled a word as part of a wordplay, and she honestly thought I was illiterate, missing the witticism. Third World was a case of us trying to do a lot because we were exposed to a lot.
There was a consciousness about the movement taking place in Jamaica, and the message came closer as we grew. The international exposure brought it home to us.
Kwame Dawes Let me start with the most obvious question: Ibo. Where did that name come from?
Ibo Cooper I got the nickname right as I started with Inner Circle, just after I left high school, because of the fighting in Nigeria. I was skinny, and the Biafran War had pictures of starving children, and you know how Jamaicans tease and rib about things. It became a name because of the Ibos in Nigeria.
KD You are currently in Runaway Bay teaching at a residential conference for Caribbean musicians. This teaching has become a part of your new life—training artists, traveling around talking about the music business, passing your knowledge on to others. Teaching is a passion for you, isn’t it?
IC I grew up in a family of teachers, and many of the people I admire were teachers. This business of passing things on to others is something I have developed a passion for. Most of the time I am asked to come in because I am one of the few musicians who bridged the gap between formal training—that is, western European music—and the oral tradition in Jamaica. I have never held any preference for one side or the other. I have always recognized the power of the informal music that became reggae.
KD Would you prefer to be remembered as Ibo Cooper, Third World, or Ibo Cooper, teacher?
IC The Third World thing is not going to go away anytime soon. And I wouldn’t want it to go away—that is a quarter century of my life in which I made a great impact on the world, as a vocalist and musician and, in a way, bandleader. But the youths whom I have come in contact with over the last four years have become family, like my children. And they have never seen me perform with the group, except on video. So the interaction is quite different, but we remember the efforts to get good grades in order to get school fees and to get a gig here and a gig there, and we become connected. These are especially the music students at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. I went there part-time at first and started a popular music ensemble, teaching how to play as a band. Then I came aboard full-time as head of the Caribbean, Latin American and jazz department, which is now called Popular Music Studies.
KD You came into reggae music at a time when the mandate was at once to entertain and to teach. The prophet was a standard persona in roots reggae music. Were you always comfortable with that role and with the pressures of being a teacher in that way?
IC Inner Circle was very much a pop band playing Top 40. The stress was more on entertainment than on message. With Third World our dissatisfaction with the Top 40 run was the catalyst. We wanted to be innovative, and this manifested itself first in the form of songwriting, but not necessarily message songwriting. We did not start out to be a reggae band in the purest sense. We played a lot of soul, R&B and funk. We thought it would be versatile of us to be able to do it all. Not out of a disregard for reggae, which was from our culture. The first time it ever hit me that bands specialized was when we went to England in 1975. A journalist, a white man, asked us when we were going to become a reggae band. That’s when it occurred to me that in those countries you were either this or that. I always thought that this was narrow thinking, and I always had a problem with people trying to narrow my intelligence. Actually, an African American who later managed Third World was surprised when he saw me playing in a jazz band. And last week at a concert, after I did an up-tempo blues bit one of the teachers said they did not know that I played jazz so well. I notice that the English and Americans do not have a problem with their people being versatile. Sting plays jazz, reggae, anything he wants to play. Yet when we came from the Caribbean they wanted us to be narrow. My education was quite broad. We were playing everything from Beethoven and Brahms to Bob, Sparrow, Latin. We were reading Shakespeare, we were reading the Jamaican poet and impresario Miss Lou. But even then the fact that we had received an education seemed to work against us, because there was always the stereotype of a Jamaican from the ghetto who was a bad man struggling to make it, and this music was just his or her way out of poverty. The unfortunate thing was that people started to think we were uneducated, and I am not even talking about formal education. I had a friend who was a jazz dj who was respectful in general, but one day I was making a quip and I misspelled a word as part of a wordplay, and she honestly thought I was illiterate, missing the witticism. Third World was a case of us trying to do a lot because we were exposed to a lot.
There was a consciousness about the movement taking place in Jamaica, and the message came closer as we grew. The international exposure brought it home to us.
I didn't know that.
gad know.
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