About Me
Tommy McCook O.D.
Thomas Matthew McCook was born of Jamaican parentage in Havana, Cuba on March 3, 1927. His father had left Jamaica to help construct the Panama Canal and because the workers were not allowed to bring their families, his mother Ivy briefly set up house in Cuba as the closest place they could meet. In 1933, Tommy came to live in Jamaica with his mother, his brother Frank and sister Inez and the family settled in East Kingston. He developed his musical skills when attending the famed Alpha School for boys from the age of ten. A Catholic school run by nuns, Alpha has a reputation in Jamaica as an institution that has nurtured some of the island's finest talent, including the likes of trumpeter Oscar Clarke who went on to play with Louis Armstrong, saxophonists Wilton "Bra" Gaynair and Joe Harriott, both of them contemporaries of Tommy's, and of course the incomparable trombone player Don Drummond. Unlike many of the boys at the school who had behavioural problems or came from troubled or deprived backgrounds, Tommy McCook had solid family roots and was a well-behaved boy. His father had persuaded the nuns who ran the school to accept him as a pupil after he had shown exceptional musical ability. The most venerated of all these nuns Sister Ignatius remembers Tommy McCook as being "focused, with time for nothing else but the three musical instruments he mastered, the tenor sax, soprano sax and flute".
In 1943, bandleader Eric Deans paid one of his periodic visits to Alpha and was so impressed with Tommy that he recruited him there and then. The Eric Deans Orchestra had a residency at the beachfront Bournemouth Club, where Tommy's mother worked in the kitchens and she was often able to watch him perform. On leaving Deans, McCook worked with guitarist Don Hitchman's sextet and also for dance bandleader Ray Coburn. It was also at this time that he began frequenting the grounations held by Ras Tafari master drummer Count Ossie, accompanying their chants with his saxophone playing.
"I would go and sit with them," he recalled. "The drums would start playing and you would come in and play whatever song you felt like playing, for you were all alone on your own instrument. There wasn't any guitar or piano or bass. It was just drums keeping time. So whatever song you chose to play, you had to remember everything in that song to make it sound right."
In 1954, McCook left Jamaica for the Bahamas where he joined an outfit in the capital Nassau playing 1940s style big band jazz in the manner of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, which occupied his time for the next eight years. Returning to Jamaica on a short visit in 1960, he was duly impressed by the burgeoning record industry taking shape in the ideas of a new generation of musicians. Having fulfilled all his outstanding engagements in Nassau, McCook arrived home in 1962 and began immersing himself in the local recording scene. His first sessions were a couple of instrumentals for Coxsone with 'Road Block' and 'Exodus' and in the spring of 1964 became involved in forming a studio band at the producer's request. This was the Skatalites, the cornerstone of Jamaican sounds built around a nucleus of some of the island's top musicians of the day. From their formation in June 1964 to their break up a mere 14 months later, the Skatalites recorded several hundred sides on their own account and backed the best of Jamaica's vocal talent on several hundred more. The group played all over the island, although they were essentially based at the Bournemouth Club in East Kingston.
After the Skatalites split up, McCook went on to form the Supersonics studio band for Coxsone's great rival Duke Reid at his Treasure Isle studio on Bond Street. Here he forged the rock steady sound with groups like the Techniques and Melodians and singers such as Alton Ellis, who Tommy McCook rated as the best and most committed singer of his era. His horn arrangements on a series of hits for the label gave these productions a superior lustre, while his saxophone workouts on these same rhythms or else on instrumentals in a wide variety of styles such as 'Reggae Merengue' or interpretations of standards and show tunes like 'I'm Getting Married In The Morning' and even a modern country classic with 'Ode To Billy Joe', all demonstrated his ability to work with a tune or musical idea and adapt it in his own manner.
In addition to his Treasure Isle work, he also worked for a number of other local producers and following Reid's death in the mid-1970s supplied the horn arrangements on much of the roots music of the era, including work for Glen Brown, Bunny Lee, Channel One, Joe Gibbs and a brilliant album alongside trumpeter Bobby Ellis for Yabby You suitably titled 'Blazing Horns'. In later years he recorded and toured again with the Skatalites, until illness forced him to give up for good in 1996. During his later years, Tommy lived in the United States at Atlanta, Georgia and died there from heart failure on May 5, 1998.
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