 Ellsworth
McGranahan “Shake” Keane was
born on May 30, 1927, in St. Vincent, Caribbean. Born into a humble
family that loved books and music, he completed his early education
on the island and worked at the St. Vincent Grammar School as a
“pupil-teacher” or teaching assistant of Music, French, and English
literature. Taught to play the trumpet by his father, Charles (who
died when Keane was thirteen), Keane’s first public recital was
at age six. At age fourteen, 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 one of the island’s leading bands,
Ted Lawrence and His Silvertone Orchestra. The distinctive horn-playing
of Keane became a feature of the annual Vincentian carnival, long
before he would be called one of the best flugel horn players in
Europe and became known in international jazz circles during the
1950s and 1960s. His complimentary passion to music was poetry,
which he had been writing since childhood. (It is still not certain
whether the boyhood nickname of “Shake” was short for Shakespeare
because Shake so loved literature or for the song Chocolate Milk
Shake that he loved as a youth.) 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. While he did not complete his formal studies
in Europe, he recited poetry and prose for and eventually became
a producer at Caribbean Voices, the influential BBC General Overseas
Service program. Keane’s commitment to writing was as unabated as
the application of his “sharp innovative intelligence” to playing
music--mambo, kaiso, highlife, and “free form” jazz. 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
of 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. A year later he was appointed
principal of Bishop’s College in Georgetown, St. Vincent, and taught
at the Intermediate High School in the capital. In 1979, St. Vincent,
along with eight closely grouped sister islands, emerged from centuries
of British colonial rule to become the independent country of St.
Vincent and the Grenadines. In that historic year, Keane self-published
The Volcano Suite - A series of five poems, and he won what
is still the most prestigious pan-Caribbean literary prize, Cuba’s
Premio Casa De Las Americas 1979 Poetry. The winning collection,
One A Week With Water, was published concurrently in Havana
by Casa and remains an essential work of Keane. In 1981, after attending
CARIFESTA IV in Barbados, Shake Keane emigrated from his native
land to the USA and lived in Brooklyn, New York, with his third
wife, Margaret Bynoe. In Brooklyn, he was unable to find immediate
work because of his immigrant status and later admitted to feelings
of alienation from his “rugged” Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
But the father of three sons, the “musical chameleon,” and the poetic
iconoclast of “all kinds of ‘sacred cows,’” intensified his poetry
writing though 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,
Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gordon Rohlehr, Edward Baugh,
Adrian Fraser, 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. The Angel Horn - Shake Keane
(1927-1997) Collected Poems, an anthology of six unpublished
manuscripts, is the fifth and most comprehensive book of Shake Keane’s
poetic range and vision from the late 1940s to his last poem written
in 1997. At age seventy, 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, raconteur, “the grand egalitarian,” was honored by his
country with the unveiling of a life-size bust at the Peace Memorial
Hall in Kingstown. |
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The
Angel Horn
Shake Keane (1927-1997) – Collected Poems
by Shake Keane
Price: US$18
Paperback, poetry, literature, 182 pp. (2005)
ISBN: 0-913441- 66-X
The Angel Horn… is vintage
Shake Keane.… spanning a period of 40 years … the
best of Keane, his mastery of the folk culture,play on words,
use of nation language and of musical symbols and themes, and
the integration of rhymes and riddles … .
- Dr. Adrian Fraser, author, scholar,
St. Vincent & The Grenadines |
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