Words by Atillah Springer
The name Oluko Imo isn’t well known in Port of Spain, but the story of the striking and charismatic leader of Black Truth Rhythm Band is an important part of Trinidad’s music history. Oluko Imo was born and raised in Laventille, a patchwork of communities stretching across the hills surrounding East Port of Spain that had been a hotbed of radical cultural action after the Abolition of chattel slavery in 1838. It was in these hills that Yoruba people settled as indentured workers after being rescued from intercepted slave ships. Orisa, the spiritual tradition of Yoruba people, along with the syncretic Afro-Christian Spiritual Baptist faith were sources of inspiration for the evolving forms of calypso, the masquerade traditions that can still be seen at Carnival and the birth of the steelpan that came into being in direct resistance to the banning of African skin drums in the 1880s.
As a teenager, Imo was a vocalist in Blue Veils, one of the many young combo bands that played covers of North and Latin American hits. And then in 1970, a revolution happened. Cries of Black Power - the term coined by the Trinidad born, US based civil rights leader Kwame Ture - echoed through the streets of Port of Spain. The urgent call from public meetings and demonstrations was for Afro and Indo Trinidadians to turn away from colonial ideologies and agitate against the lack of opportunities for the persistently impoverished working class. Imo had been classmates with several leaders of the protests who were jailed when a State of Emergency was declared on April 21, 1970. Curfew put an end to Port of Spain’s thriving nightlife and many of the popular combo bands of the 60s perished in that fallow period. It was during that time that Imo and others began to explore the African connections in the music.
One of their sources of information and inspiration was an elder called Baba Imo who ran a local chapter of Marcus Garvey's UNIA. ‘Baba Imo was teaching us Yoruba language and drumming. It was under his guidance that we were given new African names. It was in Baba Imo’s yard that we spent time with Bertie Marshall and Rudolph Charles, who were seriously innovating with the steelpan,’ recalls Andre Labeijoba Wallace, who joined Blue Veils as their guitarist in January 1971. Blue Veils dissolved later that year and in early 1972 Black Truth Rhythm Band was born. By then they were leaning more heavily into calypso, which had also been deeply affected by Black Power.
‘A few members of the band were Orisa devotees. And Oluko was a Spiritual Baptist. In fact it was after he went on the mourning ground (an intense period of fasting, prayer and meditation) that he came back with the message to become Black Truth and begin to play a more conscious music.’ Wallace describes the early days of Black Truth shows as challenging: ‘People didn’t understand what we were doing. They were walking out before we finished the first song.’
But Imo believed in the mission. They were playing backup for calypsonians nightly in clubs in Port of Spain, tightening their sound. In 1973, the band swept through a local competition, winning some cash and a recording contract.
‘It took us a year to get the promoter to honour the commitment for us to record,’ Wallace said.
“It was music that showed me that I could bring out my African self in my music," recalled the late Brother Resistance who is remembered as the Father of rapso music. “They got a recording contract when all these hotshot (calypso) artists were struggling to get out there.”
Black Truth went to KH Studios where they worked on their first release, Aspire in 1974. The flip side track ‘Imo’ got to Number 3 on the Caribbean Hit Parade, giving them the encouragement to keep recording. By then their live shows were packed.
‘Although we were playing dance music, we now had a different problem of people coming on stage and sitting down to listen to the lyrics and absorb the music.’ Wallace recalls.
It took another two years for Ifetayo to be recorded and released. Imo’s voice was smooth, a deep river’s calm, in stark contrast to soca’s frenzied and sex soaked driving bass, and this addition to the offerings of the Trinidad music scene was a hit. Yoruba for ‘love is enough for joy’, Ifetayo is a moving collection of songs that openly celebrates Trinidad’s African musical traditions. In addition to the buoyant title track with its funky, thumping bass, there are the more reflective, even melancholic tracks like ‘Aspire and ‘Save the Musician’, which draw heavily on calypso’s storytelling role. ‘Kilimanjaro’ takes the transcendent energy of sacred gatherings from hidden yards to any dance floor in the world. Although they opened for Peter Tosh in Port of Spain in 1978, Wallace says Black Truth dissolved after promises for a tour to Africa and Europe never materialised. ‘The promoter wanted us to change our clothing and our names. We were too Afrocentric for them.’
Imo headed to Venezuela in 1979 where he re-connected with Franklin George, a musician friend who had fled to Caracas because of his connections to the National Union of Freedom Fighters, a guerilla group, many of whose members were killed by the police between 1972 and 73. From Caracas Imo went to New York, and it was there that he first met Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Their connection was as natural as a reunion of two long lost brothers. Imo moved to Lagos and entered into multiple roles, serving as both road manager and sometime bassist for Fela’s Egypt 80 band.
Those deep ties led to their 1988 collaboration Were Oju Le (The Eyes Are Getting Red), recorded in Lagos and released in New York. The track was the B Side to Oduduwa, a track written and often performed in Lagos but recorded in New York with a group of US based musicians. On it Imo hails Oduduwa, known in Yoruba mythology as progenitor of their people, in a song that is directed at the diaspora, urging scattered African peoples to keep the connection to the continent alive.
Imo returned to Trinidad in 2001 to bury his father and in 2002, he returned to Lagos to collaborate with Fela’s son Seun who had taken over leadership of Egypt 80 after Fela’s death in 1997. The result was Anoda System, on which Seun can be heard on the track City of the Gate. Imo also enlisted the help of ‘King of Covers’ Lemi Ghariokwu for the album’s cover art. Glory of Om leans fully into the Afrobeat sound and features the deep grooves familiar to fans of Egypt 80. The sound character of Fela’s Lagos is stamped indelibly on the tempo and vibration on the music, but Imo’s delivery still has an unmistakable calypso lilt, Trinidad is there in the storytelling and the hands stretched out to the world. By this time in the fading glory of Pan Africanism, the music continues to appeal for a unity that is perhaps too long buried under neo-liberal concerns to have the same impact as the 70s and 80s.
