Jamaica's elderly Jolly Boys a hit on int'l stages (AP)

PORT ANTONIO, Jamaica – The Jolly Boys, a trio of elderly Jamaican musicians who play a rollicking type of folk music nearly forgotten by time, are enjoying an unexpected revival after nearly 60 years of entertaining tourists on the island's hotels.

Playing on acoustic, sometimes homemade instruments, the group's forte is mento — a Jamaican dance music created by the descendants of African slaves in the late 19th century. It features banjo, maracas, a rough-hewn wooden box with metal prongs to pluck bass notes, and often bawdy lyrics.

But these days, by fusing traditional sounds with rock and pop hits, including Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" and Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," the septuagenarian Jolly Boys are bringing the jubilant sound of mento — the rhythm of the Caribbean island's dancehalls long before ska and reggae — to European arenas and hipster venues in the United States.

For Albert Minott, the group's 72-year-old guitarist and gravelly voiced frontman, preserving the once vibrant musical genre and expanding its possibilities is a lifelong mission.

"Over the years, mento has been locked down in a cooking pot by these guys with their big amplifiers, big soundboxes. So it's been quietly cooking, simmering," said the dapperly dressed Minott, his brown eyes brightening in his deeply lined face.

"But now," he said, "we the Jolly Boys take off the pot cover, spoon out the mento and serve up the good taste to the young people who didn't know it. Nobody else can do it."

Mixing a traditional mento sound with punk and pop hits was the brainchild of Jon Baker, a veteran music promoter and co-owner of Geejam, a high-end resort and recording studio where the Jolly Boys recorded their "Great Expectation" album, released in the spring.

Baker said he got the idea when he finally listened with fresh ears to the Jolly Boys, the house band at Geejam. It was the beginning of the global financial recession in 2008, when the hotel side of the business was slow. For years, he had dismissed mento as "tourism music."

"We could make a beautifully classic mento album and it would sell 2,000 records worldwide. So we thought of a way of taking the elements of mento, but choose rock classics, or basically go into my iPod and choose songs that were very influential to me and my growth," Baker said in Geejam's recording studio, framed by lush tropical forest and the Caribbean Sea.

The experiment has worked beautifully. Earlier this year, Minott and the Jolly Boys introduced mento to hundreds of thousands of music fans while opening up for Sade on a European tour. In Britain, the band has appeared on the live BBC music show, "Later With Jools Holland." They recently played at a three-day music festival in New York, and are heading to Hong Kong next month.

"We are being selective now. They are not an 18-year-old alternative band that can jump in the back of the truck," said Baker, who was a hip-hop promoter and owner of the Gee Street Records label in the 1980s.

Indeed, two 80-something members of the Jolly Boys, percussionist Allan Swymmer and banjo player Egbert Watson, stepped down from the band's tours and recording sessions after the schedule proved too hectic. Watson is also battling Alzheimer's disease. Younger musicians now fill out the trio's sound.

But while celebrated abroad as a Jamaican version of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, the group remains fairly obscure in their own Caribbean homeland, at least outside of their coastal hometown of Port Antonio, an off-the-beaten track place where time seems suspended in another era.

"We'd been down all those years. It was rough. The officials in Jamaica, they don't step forward to the mento. I don't see why they turn their back on it," said Derrick "Johnny" Henry, the band's "rumba box" player who has worked as a fisherman when gigs were scarce.

The Jolly Boys, originally called the Navy Island Swamp Boys, got their start in the 1950s performing at Hollywood star Errol Flynn's private island in the Port Antonio area, which at the time was the playground of the swashbuckling actor, European bluebloods and American old-money socialites.

In 1989, American singer-songwriter Jules Shear saw the band during a visit to the now defunct Trident Hotel on Jamaica's north coast. He recorded an album of their music for world music fans. But the international response back then is nothing like what they are experiencing now.

Joseph "Powda" Bennett, a veteran Jolly Boy who is a member of Jamaica's Maroons, whose ancestors were slaves freed by the Spanish in the 17th century to repel invading British forces, said their recent international success has effectively made them the biggest Jamaican band around.

"Over the years, we've stayed in the hotels preserving this mento. It's finally paying off now," said the 73-year-old Bennett, who has played in various incarnations of the Jolly Boys group, which has had at least 18 members over the decades.

Next up for the Jolly Boys is an album of classic mento songs that they've performed for years. Minott says he wants his group to go to No. 1 in Jamaica.

"The band is going to keep in motion, come out with some new songs, keep people smiling, keep them dancing, laughing," said Minott, who claims he maintains his lean, muscular frame with morning exercise, healthy eating, and chasing women.

Daniel Neely, a New York-based ethnomusicologist who specializes in mento and played banjo on the "Great Expectation" record, said Minott's loose-limbed charisma is key to the ascendancy of the Jolly Boys.

"He's been performing for tourists since he was a child so he just has a superlative intuitive sense of how people look at a performer on stage. I've never really met somebody who performs like Albert does. He really, really knows how to work a crowd," Neely said.

Sure to help raise the group's profile in their Caribbean homeland is a planned docudrama movie and a local reality TV show in the works about Minott, who intersperses his singing and guitar-playing duties with joyful soft-shoe steps during concerts.

Whatever the future brings, Minott and his two companions say they will enjoy the veteran group's late successes.

"There are places we go now that we didn't expect that we would ever know. Places that as a boy you read about in a comic book — Russia, Germany, France, Spain, England. And now we go to all those places. Isn't that wonderful? To do that at this age," said Minott, grinning. "Our grandkids brag about it."

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Online: http://www.jollyboysmusic.com/

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David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfadd

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When it comes to stages, there are no universal standards (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Thursday's deadly collapse of another outdoor concert stage in stormy weather conditions could lead to tougher construction standards - but any such standards will surely be difficult to enforce.

Each summer, thousands of temporary stages are erected around the globe for outdoor concert series. Each stop on the tour, bands and their crews have to contend with local laws.

Consider the latest tragedies: Outdoor concert stages in Ottawa, Indianapolis and Belgium have collapsed in the past month, causing the death of more than a half dozen; scores more have been injured.

That's three different storms, three different cities - and, crucially, three different stages, built by different companies using different specs and different safety standards.

"These collapses highlight the fact that there are no enforced guidelines for temporary structures in the concert business," said Gary Bongiovanni, the publisher of the concert-industry trade journal Pollstar.

There are some guidelines," he told TheWrap on Thursday, "but they're voluntary. And it'll be hard to put enforced rules in place, because on a concert tour you're dealing with the local laws in every city."

International standards would be even harder to implement.

Bongiovanni blamed the collapses to fierce weather rather than faulty construction: "No temporary structure is going to be able to withstand the kind of winds that can come up in storms like these."

But based on the videos of the incidents, he does think that some of the stages were safer than others. In Ottawa, for instance, he said the drapes on the side of the stage were tied closed, when reasonable safety standards should have allowed them to open in high winds.

"If you look at the video from Indianapolis, the side drapes there are working the way they're supposed to work," he said. "In Canada, they clearly weren't."

Onstage equipment was also destroyed in Tulsa, although no one was injured in that incident.

Plasa, an international organization providing technical resources for the entertainment industry, publishes voluntary guidelines for the construction of temporary stages for outdoor events. Its latest update of the standards is due to be released in October, and is currently available for public review at the company's website.

Bongiovanni thinks that the rash of collapses may increase the call for uniform standards - but in a business in which most touring acts are forced to rely on a new array of local engineers, designers, construction crews and promoters in each city, he said uniformity will be hard if not impossible to enforce.

"You have very well-established companies doing work in this field, and you have other companies putting up temporary structures with nowhere near the same level of engineering," he said.

"Sometimes you go with the lowest bidder, and that can mean there are compromises made."

"I doubt we'll ever really have national rules," he added. "But if more people started adopting the Plasa guidelines, at least we'd have something to gauge it against."

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Japanese singer Yui stages 1st foreign show (AP)

HONG KONG – Rising Japanese singer-songwriter Yui has ventured beyond her home market, staging her first overseas show in the southern Chinese territory Hong Kong.

The 24-year-old pop star, whose full name is Yui Yoshioka, played to a packed house at the 14,000-seat AsiaWorld-Expo Arena on Hong Kong's outlying Lantau Island late Sunday. Fans stood and clapped throughout most of the two-hour set except for a short acoustic segment when Yui told the crowd to sit down.

Yui debuted in 2004 and shot to fame after her appearance in the 2006 Japanese movie "Taiyo no Uta," which means "Song of the Sun." She also performed "Goodbye Days," the hit song from the film's soundtrack.

Her albums are "From Me to You," "Can't Buy My Love," "I Loved Yesterday" and "Holidays in the Sun."

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Amos Lee takes diverse sound to 2 Bonnaroo stages (AP)

MANCHESTER, Tenn. – Tucson isn't the first place you think of when the topic of musical journeys comes up. The Arizona town felt just right for a little self-exploration to Amos Lee, though.

The Philadelphia singer was on a quest of sorts when he started recording his fourth album, "Mission Bell," and he found just what he was looking for in the desert home of producer Joey Burns and his band Calexico.

"I've listened to a lot of Calexico's records, and I love how Joey and John (Convertino) and everybody else in the band just work with — I don't really like using this terminology but it's the best I can come up with — the sonic landscape that they create. It's rich and it's deep, but it's also subtle and simple at the same time. I've always really appreciated the way they make sound move."

And the way they helped Lee with the multiple flavors and colors of "Mission Bell" has kicked the former second-grade teacher's career into a higher orbit. His first three albums were well-received, and he was already a popular collaborative partner. But he's in even higher demand, opening for Adele, working with artists as diverse as Zac Brown Band and James Gadson, and holding down two slots at this year's Bonnaroo — Saturday's acoustic performance and a full-band set Sunday.

"It is definitely the busiest I've been with all the stuff I've done, just with the press, the TV, the trips back and forth to Europe," Lee said while standing in the meager shade of a tent backstage at Bonnaroo. "I've had stretches where I've probably done more shows, but I've never been busier and I've never had a more intense experience that I've had this time."

Part of that success is due to the inventiveness of "Mission Bell," an album that marks a blossoming for the 33-year-old singer. Burns and his Calexico mates helped Lee break out of a neo-soul niche that had begun to chafe. Lee was looking for a way to reacquaint himself with the things that had made music so exciting back when he was playing open mic nights in neighborhood bars.

"You get stagnant, and I felt like some ways as a performer I was not feeling the same way about performing as I did before," Lee said. "So I had to find and am still looking for new ways to open myself up even more to the experience of playing for people and to open that energy up more that comes between the audience and the performer."

Burns, Convertino and Calexico have a reputation for taking collaborators places they've never been before. They've worked previously with Iron & Wine, Neko Case, Nancy Sinatra and My Morning Jacket's Jim James on a powerful version of "Going to Acapulco" for Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan film "I'm Not There," among many others.

They're known for a Southwestern-flavored blend of Americana that's lush, vibrant and haunting. After meeting briefly in Europe while on tour, Lee and Burns were reintroduced by Willie Nelson's harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, while Lee was looking for a producer and quickly decided to work together.

Burns was intrigued by the "transitioning" Lee was undertaking and thought he might be able to help.

"I think he's been pursuing that for a while, trying to figure out what he does and what he does well," Burns said in a phone interview from Tucson. "He can do so many different things so well, I think he's really now applying the ability to distill everything together into his sound and his identity in his songs and his music. So I think it is an exciting time as a fan of Amos and his music."

Lee scheduled a trip to Tucson last year to see if things would work out, and after recording a few songs, he came away convinced. Lee immediately felt like a kid let loose in the toy store at Wavelab studios, where everything he could imagine, from unique guitars and amps to glockenspiels and vibraphones, were laid out in a big room.

"It really does give you a chance to delve a little deeper into what you want to do, I guess, sonically," Lee said. "As an acoustic guitar player I really haven't spent a lot of time doing it and I really loved it. The atmosphere is just wide open."

Lee says "Mission Bell," which features appearances by Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams and Sam Beam, has a live feel that comes from everyone gathering in a big room and throwing out ideas. The group would set aside one song to work on another that felt more urgent, sometimes nailing a track in a take or two.

Along the way they layered on little details and highlights that pushed the sound into three dimensions. The Spanish-flavored horns on "El Camino," for instance, sit in the distance and create a different mood than you might find in a soul song. A haunting pedal steel guitar line by Greg Leisz helps push "Windows Are Rolled Down" along like a sunny Sunday drive. And then there's the final moments of "Violin," a one-take wonder that breaks down into a fuzzy guitar feedback coda as Lee quietly sings, "Oh, God. Oh, God."

All this adds up to something more than soul, folk, jazz and all those other tags that have overburdened Lee.

"There's been comparisons to Bill Withers, which is great, I love that," Burns said. "But it's more than that, too. He's got other influences. He really kind of confuses definitions, which is really interesting to me because I'm a fan of that kind of music where it's just not blatantly one thing, but it expands into other areas and other things."

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Online:

http://www.amoslee.com

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Contact Chris Talbott at http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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UK's Glyndebourne fest stages tainted Wagner opera (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – The founder of Britain's Glyndebourne festival loved Wagner and performed excerpts from "Die Meistersinger" on the organ, but that was before the Nazis adopted the composer's longest opera as their signature piece.

On Saturday, in its first production of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" and only second Wagner opera, Glyndebourne will attempt to show that a work used to stir up nationalism and anti-Semitism by the Third Reich is fitting musical fare for its well-heeled patrons, fortified for the seven-hour journey with lobster tail and rack of lamb during a long interval.

"I don't think Wagner was imparting ideas which were outspokenly fascist," conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who will lead the performance, said, confronting the issue head on.

"The fact that they (Wagner's operas) have been abused by the Nazis later on only says something about the ambiguity of Wagner's ideas," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Everyone associated with the production, staged by the world-renowned director David McVicar, is aware that a lot is riding on the artistic, as well as financial, success of what is probably the most expensive and ambitious opera produced at Glyndebourne since it was founded in 1934 by wealthy landowner John Christie and his opera-singer wife.

Although details of the staging, as is usual in these affairs, have been kept under wraps, it is known that the historical period of Wagner's tale about a song contest sponsored by an opera guild in 16th-century Nuremberg has been moved to Wagner's time, the 19th century.

In addition to the soloists, there will be some 140 people on stage, including circus performers, a full orchestra in the pit and a chorus of about 90.

These are big -- and costly -- forces for the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, which gets all its funding from sponsors and ticket sales, but the fact that all 10 performances of an opera which begins just before 3 p.m. and, with two intervals, ends almost seven hours later, are sold out is music to the ears of general director David Pickard.

To accommodate those who can't get in for love or money, the opera will be streamed on the Guardian newspaper's website for its final performance on June 26.

"This gives truth to the myth that this place is about nice, light entertainment with a picnic attached," Pickard told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Serious operas are wonderfully suited to the sort of overall experience here at Glyndebourne, especially spending a day immersed in music and a beautiful garden."

"Honor YOUR GERMAN MASTERS"

Harder to shake are the opera's Nazi associations. It was Hitler's favorite and he was a regular visitor, before and during World War Two, to see it performed at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the hall in northern Bavaria that Wagner purpose-built to showcase his works.

At the end of the opera, the main character, cobbler and poet Hans Sachs, sings the line that endeared it to the Nazis and has caused trouble ever since: "Honor your German masters."

Jurowski, for one, thinks the words, and the whole opera, have been taken out of context.

"He (Wagner) ...was trying to give his support to (Chancellor Otto von) Bismarck's reunified Germany and ...the idea of national identity in the 19th century in the time when Wagner was growing up was a highly liberal idea...

"But of course we know the consequences of this idea in the 20th century, and we also know about the popularity of this opera in the Third Reich. It was a piece that enjoyed greater popularity than any other work by Wagner."

Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, singing the role of Sachs, is less worried about the political and historical overtones than he is with managing what someone has figured to be 6,000 words of German -- the biggest baritone role in the repertoire.

It is the first time Finley, 51, has sung the part -- a huge departure from his recent appearance as radio personality Howard Stern in the premiere at the Royal Opera House of "Anna Nicole," based on the life of the celebrity playgirl.

"It's been one of the fuller years of my career," Finley said, adding that while it may seem like a huge leap from Stern to Sachs, the first was a supporting role while the second requires him to be on stage almost the entire time.

"But in fact it's one of those things where hopefully one gets into a groove and they're paced nicely with four days between shows," he said. "So there's enough recovery time and, one hopes, rejuvenation time, too."

(Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" in rotation at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival from May 21 through June 26. www.glyndebourne.com)

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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