Neil Charles Dark Days Quartet
Tribute to James Baldwin
Cafe Oto, Dalston London

I REMEMBER being immersed in reading the first explosive 100 pages of James Baldwin’s epochal novel, Another Country, as I rode on a Greyhound bus to take part in the massive Poor People’s Campaign demonstration in Washington DC in July 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Baldwin’s words about racist oppression and the life and suicide of the jazz drummer, Rufus Scott, were a profound message of their times. So I was determined, now in 2024, to hear Neil Charles’s Dark Days Quartet in Dalston’s Cafe Oto, celebrating Baldwin’s centenary.

With bassist Charles were vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, drummer Mark Sanders and pianist Pat Thomas, with their heritage in Grenada, Jamaica, Belize and Antigua respectively. How Baldwin would have loved to have known that his works were being remembered in such unity by this pan-Caribbean quartet in the heart of London.

The soulful depth and delving brilliance of Charles’s bass; the subtly rampant and mollifying drums, blocks, gong and cymbals of Sanders’s artistry and the musical genius of Thomas’s ear-breaking keyboard power and sudden blues lyricism gave the most relevant and meaningful soundscape to Baldwin’s choric words, sung with Watkiss’s time-worn voice with so much now-times purpose.

The first words, “dark days” were repeated, sung, scatted and thundered by Watkiss so intensely and timelessly with Thomas’s chords, Charles’s plunging strings and Sanders’s gong-blows; and the change to Thomas’s poignant blues came with the reminder that “the record is there for all to read/It’s certainly not freedom.”

Deep within the notes, words and revolutionary timbre of this superfine quartet, I heard too the Caribbean prophet Maurice Bishop calling out with all his heart and brain: “One Caribbean!” And walking out into the Dalston night, among the milling cosmos of London people, I imagined him arm-in-arm with Baldwin, and knew again that the liberating words of both men of the 20th-century Americas were unassailably true: for us, true for Gaza and Lebanon too.

Hear the Dark Days Baldwin tribute on October 7 at The Beacon in Bristol and October 9 at the Birmingham Conservatory/Eastside Jazz Club. Tickets: bristolbeacon.org and bcu.ac.uk