Dub Poet Clifton Joseph Adapts to Changing Times

By Neil Armstrong

Photo contributed      Dub poet Clifton Joseph at the Tania International Poetry Festival in  Egypt

 

Dub poet Clifton Joseph can easily adapt to new situations as evidenced in his recent tour of Egypt, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

 

While performing at the 8^th annual Tanta International Poetry Festival in Tanta, Egypt, he quickly shifted from his scheduled routine to include poems showcasing the range and mastery of his voice.

 

This adaptability also meant that during the pandemic he seized the opportunity to record his new album, Shots On Eglinton, featuring 11 compelling spoken word selections ranging in subjects from gun violence to corporate greed to paying tributes to jazz legends Billie Holiday and Thelonius Monk.  The pieces are complemented by myriad music forms, including jazz, bebop, hip-hop, calypso, drumming, funk, and blues. 

 

Having officially launched it on October 22 at the Melody Bar inside the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto and done a few performances in Canada, Joseph soon set off for his international tour in November.

 

Starting in Egypt where he spent two weeks, he performed at the international poetry event in Tanta where poets headlined at Tanta University, a library, and their performances were complemented by a giant screen in the background transcribing their work from English, Spanish, and other languages, to Arabic.  

 

“I got mobbed at the Tanta University; I had a handler, 22-year-old dude, and down there they called me Mr. Clifton,” says Joseph enthusiastically about his experience at the festival. 

 

Although he could not understand the Arabic poets — whose works were not transcribed in English, French or other languages — the veteran wordsmith relied on the saying “poetry is the universal language.” Joseph decided to concentrate on their expressiveness, in terms of intonation, diction, veracity in their voice, gesticulation, and their pacing. “I couldn’t tell you exactly what they said but I was surprised I was actually able to get the essence of what they were saying in their poems.”

 

He also performed at Al Kotob Khan, an independent publishing house and bookshop in Cairo. Before leaving the capital of Egypt, Joseph visited the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Great Pyramid of Giza and was in absolute awe of them.

 

His stay in Paris, France, for a week included his performance at the SpokenWord Paris, which has been happening for 16 years, — “the most prestigious reading series in the country,” says Joseph. From there, he performed in Hackney, London, and Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a town world renowned for books and bookshops.

Photo contributed        Clifton Joseph at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt

 

While back at his base in north Brixton, he travelled to Southampton for a performance, and also met up with Jamaica-born, Britain-based dub poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson.  

 

Johnson is putting together an anthology of his own articles and essays, and also working with the George Padmore Institute collecting British works and international poetry in the spirit of Pan Africanism and George Padmore. 

 

The George Padmore Institute (GPI) was set up in 1991. It grew out of a community of people connected with New Beacon Books, Britain's first black publisher and bookshop, and its founder John La Rose. The Institute is an archive, educational research and information centre housing materials and documents relating mainly to black communities of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in post-war Britain and continental Europe.  

 

During his downtime in London, he met up with a friend who he used to perform poems with in high school and university, reconnected with a Syrian poet he met in Tanta who lived in London, and also visited Brixton Market and Electric Avenue, which Eddy Grant’s 1983 song “Electric Avenue” highlights in response to riots in London.

 

Soon Joseph was off to Berlin, Germany, where they were launching the celebrations of the 50^th anniversary of the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Dr. Walter Rodney. Joseph performed at the launch and held a two-and-a-half-hour workshop. 

 

His 18-hour journey involved flying from the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport to Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, and then to Doha, Qatar, and from there to Cairo, Egypt. The return trip was from Berlin, Germany to Reykjavik, Iceland to Boston, to Toronto.

Photo contributed     Clifton Joseph and veteran British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson

Photo contributed        Clifton Joseph performing at the Whiskey Blue Lounge in Southampton, London

 

Now back in Toronto, the Antigua-born "dubzz/poet/at/large" is focused on selling his album and working on twoupcoming books: one will be Shots On Eglinton with the lyrics from the album, the other will be Dubzz, a coffee table publication with selected poems, photographs and visuals.

 

“During the pandemic, all artists were scrambling with how do we redo ourselves so most of us jumped to the internet. If you didn’t have a website, you need to get a website together, and you’ve got to put your stuff out on Spotify and iTunes and SoundCloud and all of that.”

 

With distribution channels down, and venues down, Joseph decided to revisit some poems from his collection of recordings and include some newer poems he had done before the pandemic hit. 

 

Realizing that he had put 11 poems together, he was planning to name the album "Dubzz," similar to his moniker, but then with all the gentrification and Eglinton Crosstown LRT construction activities happening on Eglinton Avenue West — and his poem "Shots on Eglinton" which he had done years ago when there was a spate of shootings on the block, — he decided to make the title one that ruminates on the popular neighbourhood where he lives. 

 

Joseph originally wanted to write a poem as a tribute to the community talking about “the jerk guys on the other side of the road and on the weekends they come out with big sound system, and all of the tropical foods and the women and men dressed up in their finery and the colours, and the Black tourists come in and fearful of the area but loved it too much and might have lived there for sometime or had somebody or some relative and come for their patty or oxtail, curry goat and jerk chicken and eat in the cars and just watch the people come by — we call them the Black tourists — from Peel, Keele, Durham, wherever.”

 

Taking all that into consideration, Joseph says his poem "Shots On Eglinton" and the album cover image by photographer Michael Chambers of him in the middle of traffic on Eglinton Avenue — an image similar to the iconic photo of James Dean in New York City in the rain with the cigarette and the trench coat — made him settle on the album’s name after seeing the convergence of his poem and a photographic shot taken along the urban strip.

 

Some of the selections on the new album were done over 15 years ago. Regarding the tributes to Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk, Joseph says dub poetry is generally associated with reggae music and reggae drums. 

 

“But I’m a small island guy from Antigua come out of the steel band and calypso culture and when I got to Toronto I got into funk and jazz so the reason I call myself a dubzz/poet/at/large was to identify the ‘zz’ on dubzz, to add the jazz intonations and the Bluenote and jazz and improvisations onto it. Jazz has been a major part of my poetic aesthetic, which has led me to more sonic explorations of just the power of the voice as orchestra, which is what I try to do at the best of times. I am my own musical accompaniment.” 

 

In "Recollections: A Seventees Black RAP" written by Joseph in Althea Prince’s collection of essays, Being Black, he charts the path of his arrival in Canada in 1973, his education, growth of political and social justice consciousness, and the power of music — disco, funk, soul, calypso, reggae, jazz, blues, gospel — and the anti-imperialist fervour that he shared with other Black youth in Toronto during that time.

 

When Joseph says he is his own musical accompaniment, his statement underscores Klive Walker’s description of the poet in Dubwise: Reasoning from the Reggae Underground. “As a performer, recorded or live, Joseph’s voice suggests a saxophone that honks, squeals, squawks, or rigs out orthodox melodic sentiments in a fusion of reggae-tinged “funkaiso” accents. As a rebel-word artist, his verse boogies to the syncopated beat of rich metaphors and a sharp wit.” Walker also shares some of the musical influences and influencers of calypso, funk, jazz poetry and roots reggae that impacted Joseph’s works.

 

Joseph says the Shots On Eglinton album is a retrospective of what he had not released with any fanfare and he has put them all together to show the range of his approach to dub poetry.

 

Taking on the name 'dubzz/poet/at/large" happened when he was working with Devon Haughton’s 'Bangarang Productions' in public relations and Oliver Samuels was a staple of it.

 

When Samuels came out with his series, Oliver You Large, Joseph loved the name so much that he decided to add “at large” to his name making it "dubzz/poet/at/large."

 

Joseph says the approach to poetry is “incendiary and it also means that the poetry has to get out there and that poets have responsibility to make their works get out to a crowd.”

 

This is the reason many will find him performing in various venues throughout the country. In January and February 2023, Joseph will perform in Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver, and there are plans to perform in the Caribbean too.

 

Joseph has a new single, "Subterranean Dub," a 45 RP and vinyl single that he will be pushing.

 

“The thing about the travel too is that it made me able to put those poems to bed as such and reinvigorate the creativities so that new works can come so its really sparked not just the poetry, in terms of bringing on new work, but also sparked ways of me realizing the internationalization of the work,” he says while reminiscing on his tour.

 

This signalled the importance for him to get out of town, out of what Joseph calls the “strictures of this city and the province and the country” and to find other ways of distribution and sales.

 

Joseph has a website, cliftonjoseph.com, where he sells his new album and he has come up with the idea that, “if you can’t come out to the show, the show will come to you.”

 

This involves hiring him in your houses, apartments, or if you rent a place and gather friends and family and request a reading of his first book published in 1983, Metropolitan Blues, or perform his first CD from 1989, Oral/Trans/Missions, or perform his new CD, Shots On Eglinton, or to do a combination of all three, questions and answers, a workshop on dub poetry and his own journey, or more — he will make it happen. Oral / Trans / Missions was released digitally to all streaming platforms for the first time via CDBaby on August 31.

 

“I’ve literally taken the poetry on the road and to people’s houses,” says Joseph who is a co-founder alongside Lillian Allen and Devon Haughton of De Dub Poets, the group that started Canada’s dub poetry movement. 

 

 

 

REVIEW OF SHOTS ON EGLINTON ALBUM

 

Opening with the titular "Shots on Eglinton," which is repeated later on, Joseph shines a light on gun violence claiming the lives of young Black men and the resulting anguish in the community while the violence continues. "Slo Mo" maintains the focus on gun violence undergirded by jazz while "Where Are The Politicians" infuses elements of the keteh drum to provide a critical eye on politics and whether people’s concerns are really addressed. "Not Poem" interrogates the systems dumbing down matters of importance to people and presents an analysis of the media publishing celebrity news, among other things.

 

"(That) Night in Tunisia" showcases Joseph’s dexterity with words when he references “when metaphors like meteors showered and soared like incandescent light.” In "Intense Paranoia (& -High Anxiety)," the persona/poet declares that nobody can understand him.

 

"Poem for Billie Holiday (What A Li’l Moonlight Will Do)" recorded live at the Imperial Pub in downtown Toronto is Joseph’s take of Holiday’s 1935 "What A Little Moonlight Can Do" celebrating her mission to ‘sing’ and ‘swing’ the realness of Black life in her songs. 

 

"Chant for Monk (Bounce)" infuses elements of bebop, calypso, hip-hop and scratching to reveal the wide palette of music forms and musical instruments from which the poet draws inspiration. Joseph is clearly a fan of the American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and his improvisational style. 

 

Shots On Eglinton is a clarion call to people to not be afraid to ask the hard questions of those in authority about the essentials of life and their humanity.