Cymande is a band made for our current moment — as they’ve been for 50 years. Decade after decade, new listeners wake up to the music, one album-reissue, hip-hop sample, dance-floor drop or soundtrack sync at a time, and their lives are changed.
And the world? We’d all like to believe it has changed too since Cymande rose and fell in the early 1970s — that we’re wiser, kinder, more open, more receptive.
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But both the UK that birthed them and the US that embraced them stay mired in anti-immigrant sentiment of the kind that nearly erased their existence in the first place. While the music industry still can’t properly categorize or monetize their complex fusion of psychedelic soul, Afro-Caribbean funk, and Rastafarian spirituality. So Cymande remains the most deserving underdog — the band that should’ve but didn’t, yet persisted, and now is.
With their sixth album released in January, a laudatory documentary streaming everywhere and an upcoming US tour, Cymande is more present than ever. They’ve accumulated the type of evangelizing, tastemaking audience artists dream of — one which spans generations and genres and understands impact and context. This — longside superfans like Jim James, Mark Ronson, Laura Lee and Mark Speer of Khruangbin, DJ Maseo of De La Soul, Louie Vega, Cut Chemist, DJ Kool Red Alert — could be you.
Cymande has operated on its own terms from Day 1 (which we might spot at some point in ’68-’70, though absolute accuracy is moot with a history this long). Back then founding members Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio were teenagers growing up on the same street in South London. Their parents were Guyanese members of the Windrush Generation, citizens of the English Commonwealth Caribbean who answered the call to immigrate and rebuild the mother country after the devastation of World War II. Most were well-educated professionals with families who were nevertheless met by xenophobes and bigots rallying to “Keep Britain White” and inciting race riots in Notting Hill and Brixton.
“The mother turned to her children and said, ‘We don’t want you anymore! Go back to where you came from!’” Scipio tells me. He and Patterson are on a Zoom from their respective homes outside London. “That impacted badly on our communities. We had problems with depression and things of that nature.”
“On the other hand,” says Patterson, “the negative impact on our communities created the opportunity for us to create our own environment and systems and structures.” He emphasizes that the band reflected the racial oppression at the time but certainly wasn’t created by it. “We couldn’t be. Who could?”
Cymande constructed their own world, and it sounds like nothing else before or since. Their first three albums, Cymande, Second Time Around, and Promised Heights, coming out ‘72,’73, and ‘74, are start-to-finish classics featuring Scipio on bass and Patterson on guitar, joined by fellow Windrush kids on percussion, horns, flute, drums and vocals, nine strong. Producer John Schroeder basically let the tape roll to capture the group’s raw energy and precision.
“They were a party!” Scipio says of those sessions. “John wanted to capture the essence of Cymande without too much interference, so he just let us go in the studio and play. We were young people, we were enjoying life and that is what we were communicating in our music, although the message of much of the music was serious.”
Serious but playful, haunting melodies propelled by body-moving percussion, socio-political polemic elevated by calls for unity: Cymande wrung joy from tension. In songs like “Bra,” “Dove,” “Fug,” “Brothers on the Slide” and “The Message,” that’s alchemy you hear. It stems from the contrasting aesthetic impulses between Scipio and Patterson, which they’ve been cultivating for the 62 years and counting of their friendship.
“I have a particular liking for minor keys,” Scipio says. “The sound inspires me more in terms of writing.”
“I have a major-key sensibility,” Patterson retorts. “Steve and I are opposite sides of the coin. That’s what makes us work so great together.”
If the band was originally formed around their friendship, it was kept afloat by its own DIY mutual aid and unquenchable creative force, attributes that intertwined with the concept of Black Excellence arising simultaneously from the US Civil Rights movement. Perhaps this is why Black Americans went in so hard for Cymande’s music. During their three-album run of ’72-’74, Cymande toured the US with Al Green, Mandrill, and Ramsey Lewis, appeared on Soul Train, and were the first English band to play the Apollo Theater.
Meanwhile in England, nobody seemed to care. A few years earlier the country had gone crazy for Jimi Hendrix before he caught on in America; a few years later English fans would make Bob Marley an international superstar. Enthusiasm should’ve been similar for this unique young band marrying the spirits of both. Did mainstream Brits feel shamed by the Windrush community’s strident self-sufficiency and blackball Cymande? Was the band simply too progressive, too ahead of its time? Whatever the reason, the muted reaction drove Cymande to dissolve in ’74.
In the following years Scipio and Patterson doubled down on their civic commitments, attending university and receiving law degrees. In the ’90s they relocated to the Caribbean to practice, doing so at a typically elevated level: Patterson was head of the public prosecutor’s office in Dominica for two years and Scipio served as attorney general of Anguilla from 1997-2006.
“I don’t think the word ‘adaptability’ covers what we have done. Adaptability suggests, you know, it was fiddling around,” Patterson says. “Ours was more purposeful than that. We recognized that those were gifts, opportunities, skills and talents that we had, that we were supposed to make proper use of.”
The pair moved on from music, but savvy East Coast DJs and producers kept Cymande alive in the ’80s. Raze’s “Jack the Groove,” an early house-music hit, is basically a drum-machine remake of “Bra.” “Bra” itself became a go-to peak-hour drop at block parties and discos, Scipio’s bassline looped and percussion juggled into cowbell ecstasy. Recollections on the remix’s YouTube page set the scene:
“Takes me back to East New York, Brooklyn. When you heard that bass line, it was the call to the park! Fond memories of young people getting together without fear of a shootout.”
“Takes me back to the park in Queens chillin”
“Reminds me of street skating Philly back in the late 80s early 90s”
Then came the samples. De La Soul was first: DJ Maseo’s mom spun Cymande at home when he was a boy, and he cut the horns and Scipio’s bass from “The Message” into “Change in Speak” on De La’s 1989 debut. A year later New York MC Masta Ace sampled the same song in his duet with Biz Markie, “Me and the Biz.” Queen Latifah, EPMD, 8Ball and MJG, Wu-Tang, Gang Starr, Poison Clan, Heavy D & the Boyz, MF Doom all followed. Perhaps most famous is the Fugees blowing up the sinister, sensuous guitar from “Dove” on the title track of their multi-platinum landmark The Score. That reverb! You wanna crawl inside and live there.
And that’s just US artists. MC Solaar, France’s most revered MC, broke out with his first single “Bouge De La,” which was built on top of “The Message.” British trio Ruthless Rap Assassins used the same sample to craft a fiery song about their immigrant roots called “And It Wasn’t a Dream.”
Suffice to say that Cymande supplied a cornerstone of the Golden Age of hip-hop, and dance music is equally beholden.
Pop culture is littered with overlooked artists who get their flowers only after they’re dead or washed up. Miraculously, Cymande is still here and still vital. An hourlong Zoom is not the best barometer, but judging from our interview Scipio and Patterson are energized and eloquent even in their 70s. The documentary, Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, depicts the other band members, some going back to the original lineup, as equally engaged.
Plus they’re embarking on their first major tour in a decade! Their new album Renascence contains all the elements of quintessential Cymande: light and shadow, spirituality and celebration. But the songs are more patient, more affirmed, as if the band has come closer to arriving at their destiny.
“We’ve always had faith in our music,” Scipio says. “To see all those things that we believed in all those years ago being recognized and this younger generation looking to communicate their own message, it gives vindication to how we’ve always felt.”
Hitmaking polymath Mark Ronson is one of many effusive talking heads in the documentary. He captures the significance of Cymande’s triumph in a lofty paraphrase: “The arc of history bends to the just.” A bold nod toward Martin Luther King Jr., but in Cymande’s case, it’s legit.
We now recognize DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant to the Bronx, as the Prime Mover of hip-hop. Sir Steve McQueen’s recent anthology Small Axe brought further attention to the struggles of Caribbean Commonwealth immigrants in the UK, and to their profound contributions. Like them, Cymande demonstrates that timelessness can arrive at any time and brilliance can cross any border. Those who argue otherwise?
“They are resistant to change,” says Patterson.
“We as people have never been time-bound or purpose-bound, because our intention was to fulfill our potential,” he continues. “And that was a general approach among our peers. Fulfil your potential! You have loads of it. If this door is not open, try another, because you have the skill to do it. We have the hope, expectation and desire to just be creative. So there is no end point.”
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