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Shake
Keane – The St. Vincent Connection
in Modern Caribbean Literature
A
House of Nehesi Caribbean Author Feature
News Release
Ellsworth McGranahan “Shake” Keane was
born in 1927, in St. Vincent. He completed his early schooling
on the island and worked at the St. Vincent Grammar School as a
teaching assistant of Music, French, and English literature.
Keane was taught to play the trumpet by his
father, Charles, and had his first public recital when he was
six years old. At age 14 -- a year after his father’s death --
he led a musical band made up of his brothers.
In the 1940s, with his mother Dorcas working
to raise six children, the teenager joined the Ted Lawrence and
His Silvertone Orchestra and the horn-playing of Keane became a
feature of the annual Vincentian carnival, better known as
“Vincie mas’.”
Keane’s complimentary passion to music was
poetry, which he had been writing since childhood. Before
leaving for England in 1952, to study English literature at
London University, Keane’s first two books, L’Oubli
(1950, self-published) and Ixion (1952) were published.
He did not complete his formal studies in
Europe, but went on to recite poetry and prose for, and
eventually became a producer at Caribbean Voices, the
influential BBC General Overseas Service program.
Keane started concentrating on playing music
-- mambo, kaiso, highlife, and “free form” jazz. By the late
1950s and into the 1960s, he was considered one of the best
flugel horn players in Europe and became known in international
jazz circles.
Some of his early poetry, probably because of
his music, shows some of the first signs of the jazz inflections
that would come to significantly influence Caribbean freestyle
and dub poetry decades later.
In 1972, the musician who had played with the
likes of Lord Kitchener, the Joe Harriot Quintet, and Kurt
Edelhagen, was back in the region, reciting his poetry at the
first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (CARIFESTA) in Guyana.
In 1973, Keane accepted an invitation from
the government in St. Vincent to serve as director of culture in
Kingstown, capital of the island. In 1975, the department was
closed after a change in the colony’s government
administration.
In 1979, when of St. Vincent and the
Grenadines became an independent country, Keane self-published The
Volcano Suite - A series of five poems. That same year he
won the prestigious pan-Caribbean literary prize, Cuba’s
Premio Casa De Las Americas. Casa published the winning
collection, One A Week With Water, concurrently in
Havana.
In 1981, he attended CARIFESTA IV in Barbados
and emigrated to the USA, where he was unable to find immediate
work because of his immigrant status. But in Brooklyn, New York,
where he settled with his third wife Margaret, Keane intensified
his poetry writing and attended less to his music.
His poems have appeared in the literary
journals Bim, Kyk-over-al, Savacou, and Caribbean
Quarterly and have been anthologized in Caribbean Voices,
Caribbean Verse, and You Better Believe It. The
only CD of his music, Real Keen: Reggae into Jazz, was
released in 1991 in London.
His contemporaries, literary giants,
revolutionary poets, scholars, and admirers such as George
Lamming, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gordon Rohlehr, Philip Nanton,
Val Wilmer, and Cecil Blazer Williams are among those who hail
Shake Keane as one of the innovative fathers of modern Caribbean
literature.
At age 70, ailing with stomach cancer, the
gray-bearded giant who towered at six-foot-four, died in Oslo,
Norway, in 1997--at the start of a jazz tour.
In 2003, Shake Keane, poet, musician,
educator, was honored by his country with the unveiling of a
life-size bust at the Peace Memorial Hall in Kingstown.
Keane’s authoritative collection of six unpublished
manuscripts is scheduled for publication in 2005.
OES Editor Note: Article courtesy House of
Nehesi Publishers, © 2005. Sources: Margaret Bynoe. George
Lamming. Nanton, Philip. “In
Memoriam - Ellsworth McGranahan ‘Shake’ Keane, 1927-1997,”
Wasafiri Spring 1998: 40+. Nanton, Philip.
“Real Keane,” Caribbean Beat Mar.-Apr. 2004.
Nanton, Philip. “Shake
Keane’s Poetic Legacy,” The Society For Caribbean Studies
Annual Conference Papers. Ed. by Sandra Courtman. 2000: 1.
Rohlehr, Gordon. “The Problem of the Problem of Form,” The
Shape of That Hurt and other Essays. Port of Spain: Longman,
1992: 28. Val, Wilmer. “Shake
Keane - The anger behind a free form of jazz” (Obituaries), The
Guardian 13 Nov. 1997: 18.
Photo Credits (above) Shake Keane, St.
Vincent author and national hero with his trademark beard and
beloved horn. (Courtesy M. Bynoe)
Contact
Lasana M. Sekou
542.4435
P.O. Box 460
Philipsburg, St. Martin
Caribbean
Tel/Fax (599) 542-4435
E-mail: Offshoreediting@hotmail.com
posted 11 April 2005
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