A Year, an Album, Some Musings and a Song

I regretted not being able to furnish a proper Top Ten List with which to end 2021. And that’s as fine a point as there is to put on it. I have woes, along with many of my fellow Earth denizens. Although my woes are not within a billion light years of how bad woes can be, I still needed music as a necessary sonic savior on many an occasion. Profound as those interventions were at their times, I was often too distracted to fully appreciate them. So if what follows is nothing more than a few reiterations bookended by less-than-dynamic information about my favorite album and song of the troubling year that has just ended, I apologize for any failure to properly convey what mattered to me musically in 2021. 

     Reggae music was my gateway into the myriad of sounds this world of ours has to offer. Dub reggae remains my most beloved Jamaican subgenre, and I was reminded of such by the release of Sly & Robbie Vs. Roots Radics: The Dub Battle (Dubshot Records), a dub version of the same artists’ The Final Battle from 2018. Bittersweet was whatever victory either side could have claimed from such a sound clash, because of the recently (and not as recently) deceased reggae artists featured on both discs. At the time of the dub release, the number of late greats who had a hand in it included producers Lee Perry, Bunny Lee and King Tubby, plus foundational singer Toots Hibbert. The toll was sadly capped by the December passing of extraordinary bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who alongside drummer Sly Dunbar formed the Riddim Twins, trailblazers in reggae and well beyond.

The death of history’s second most renowned Shakespeare considerably darkened reggae’s normally positive vibes late in the year, just as the earlier 2021 farewells to singers Bunny Wailer and Garth Dennis, deejay U Roy, guitarist Mikey Chung and Astro Wilson and Brian Travers of UB40 had done. But let me not slip into eulogizing. Back on point regarding The Dub Battle, what made it my top album of 2021 was the way it served as a jolting reconnect of why I loved reggae and dub to begin with.

There was other music that worked its magic on me, and deeply so. Algerian mandola master Abdelli returned with his usual spellbinding mix of Berber roots and whatever else catches his ear and ours. Ivory Coast’s Dobet Gnahore went more electric than usual and lost not a trace of her vocal might. Francesc Sans brought Spanish bagpiping to ecstatic new levels. The jazz/Korean fusion of Gugak Jazz Society broke new ground into some very delectable pieces. Belcirque, a nearly all-girl Belgian band, pieced together folk, African, Caribbean and Latin styles to create an irresistibly swinging whole.

Still, no one piece of music moved me (and conversely kept me attentively still) like “Meeting is Over,” a new collaboration between the U.S.A.’s Moira Smiley and the U.K.’s Piers Faccini. If you’re not already familiar with the multifaceted music of Moira Smiley, get on it. She’s a national treasure of international proportions.

While Piers Faccini is newer to me, I found the beauty he brings to his parts of the tune instantly engaging. “Meeting is Over” is a traditional song that’s been credited to sources ranging from Shakers to Pagans. Lyrically, it addresses loved ones with whom we must part ways, possibly for the last time. And if it should be the last, we may take comfort in the image of a distant shore upon which we will land and be “safe for ever more.”

Moira and Piers’ traded vocals caress each other as perfectly as their instrumental input: Moira on banjo, percussion and production; Piers on guitar and guembri, the latter a three-stringed bass lute also known as a sintir to the Moroccan Gnawa people in whose music it is most prominently featured. The addition of the guembri, along with a subtle, calabash-like beat that rises and falls as the song progresses, makes for a seamlessly perfect melding of African, European and American roots. An extra layer of guitar courtesy of Seamus Egan helps it become so. Most likely to be interpreted as a vision of the afterlife, in these times “Meeting is Over” also has the feel of humankind longing to let loose a collective sigh of relief if and when our current troubles (of which there are so many) ever cease. The song is intended as a goodbye to 2021 and a greeting to 2022. And that it is, most wonderfully.

Author: Tom Orr

Tom Orr is a California-based writer whose talent and mental stability are of an equally questionable nature. His hobbies include ignoring trends, striking dramatic poses in front of his ever-tolerant wife and watching helplessly as his kids surpass him in all desirable traits.