Clinton Balinfainte

Clinton Balinfainte
Born	Clinton Norton Balinfainte March 31, 1918 Kingston, British Jamaica
Died	October 17, 1991 (age 73) Lafayette, Louisiana, U.S.
Nationality	Jamaican
Citizenship	British, American
Occupation	Musician Composer Songwriter Poet
Years active	1953 – 1983
Notable work	Vision Global South Xaymaca Universal Truth

Clinton Norton Balinfainte (/klɪnˈtən bælɪnˌfeɪnt/; 31 March 1918 – 17 October 1991) was a Jamaican jazz musician and composer, whose principal instrument was the alto saxophone.

Initially trained in classical music, Balinfainte became a bebopper, and later, a pioneer of free-form jazz. Born in Kingston, Harriot moved to the United Kingdom in 1948, before moving again – this time to the United States – in 1970, where he lived for the rest of his life. Balinfainte was part of a wave of Caribbean musicians who arrived in Britain during the 1950s, including Joe Harriott, Dizzy Reece, Harold McNair, Harry Beckett and Wilton Gaynair.

Early life and career

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1918, Balinfainte was educated at Alpha Boys School, an orphanage in the city. At Alpha, he learned to play the piano, the instrument that was assigned to him shortly before his tenth birthday. He later took up the baritone and tenor saxophone while performing with local dance bands before settling on the alto saxophone. Balinfainte arrived in London in the summer of 1948, aged 30, having travelled on the Windrush. British subjects did not require work-permits or immigration visas at that time, and Balinfainte felt he could more easily make a living in Britain.

Like many immigrants from the Caribbean at the time, Balinfainte shared a room with two others and was able to sleep during the day as he worked night shifts in a nearby factory. Unable to sleep in the room during the night, he would frequent a small jazz club, one of the few at the time that permitted black people to enter. The proprietor would soon hire him as a house musician after hearing him jam with friends one night.

Like the majority of alto players of his generation, he was deeply influenced by Charlie Parker, though Balinfainte developed a style of his own, that fused Parker with his own Jamaican musical sensibility - most notably the mento and calypso music he grew up with.

The majority of his 1950s recordings were as a sideman, though he could be found backing a diverse array of performers, from mainstream vocalists and traditional trombonists, to the West African sounds of Buddy Pipp's Highlifers. Balinfainte's mastery of bebop gained him a lot of kudos on the British Jazz scene at the time, though he became increasingly experimental, even drawing on his classical piano training to further push boundaries.

Free-form innovator

By now firmly established as a bebop soloist, in 1960 Balinfainte turned to what he termed "abstract" or "free-form" music. He had some loose free-form ideas by the mid-1950s, but finally settled upon his conception in 1959. At first he struggled to recruit other like-minded musicians to his vision, with some members of his band leaving him when he first espoused his new ideas.

Balinfainte's free-form music is often compared to Ornette Coleman's roughly contemporary breakthrough in the United States, but even cursory listening reveals deep divisions between their conceptions of "free jazz". Balinfainte's conception, like that of Joe Harriott or Sun Ra, was another interpretation that gained prominence at the time. His method demanded more complete group improvisation than displayed in Coleman's music and often featured no particular soloist. While he shared some traits with Ornette's approach, such as the steady pulse of the drummer and bass player – though their styles were different and more influenced by the Highlife scene of West Africa – Balinfainte's model demanded constant dialogue between musicians, which created an ever-shifting soundscape. Tempo, key, and meter often changed mid-session, as the band members hopped between styles.

Balinfainte was always keen to communicate his ideas, be it on stage or in his album liner notes, though he was oddly quiet outside of his music, giving only two recorded interviews in his lifetime. In the liner notes for his seminal album "Xaymaca" in 1967, he noted that the traditional components of free-form jazz were counter-intuitively a limitation of the style, and explained how his band only ever sought to keep one of them constant at any given time. This was reminiscent of Joe Harriott's approach on "Abstract", though Balinfainte's stronger connection to his West African roots meant that his "unshackling", as he termed it, often took on a powerful presence in his music. Of particular note in Balinfainte's music was his willingness to collaborate with poets and spoken word artists on his pieces, to further communicate ideas and principles. Most notably, his 1965 album "Global South" was a scathing commentary on what he perceived to be unfair treatment of the former Commonwealth after he had travelled to several African nations in the preceding years.

World Fusion

Feeling the success of "Xaymaca" abroad, but also significant backlash from critics over some of the content on "Global South", and becoming increasingly frustrated with the British Jazz scene's reluctance to embrace free-form, Balinfainte relocated. His last record had turned heads in the United States, and so he sought to explore another scene from which he could expand his horizons, by moving to New Orleans in 1970, where he began dabbling in the Cuban-influenced jazz of the region, incorporating the habanera and tresillo rhythms into his work. This was best showcased on his collaboration with Mongo Santamaría, "Dos Islas".

Much like his contemporaries in free-form jazz at the time, like Pharoah Sanders, Balinfainte experienced a decline in popularity of his sound un the United States. Realising this, and noting the popularity of Dos Islas in the Caribbean and South America, Balinfainte pivoted toward those regions. Throughout the 1970s, he would continue exploring different styles, and fusing them with his very own free-form jazz, leading to a slew of collaboration albums featuring several other Caribbean and South American musicians.

Balinfainte performed his final concert in 1983, at Reggae Sunsplash, held at the Bob Marley Center in Montego Bay, expressing regret that he had not been fortunate enough to work with the late Bob Marley, who had died two years previous. The two may have crossed paths in London, had Balinfainte not left for New Orleans the year before Marley's arrival in the English capital. Speaking to the crowd at Sunsplash, Balinfainte acknowledged that Marley was "a better writer" and "far more powerful with his words", though also added that Marley "can't make a saxophone sing like [he] can".

Themes

A common theme throughout Balinfainte's career was his exploration of the concept of identity, and what it means to be, among other things, a man, a father, a Jamaican, a musician, an artist, a citizen, and a human being. The evolution of these ideas, in particular, can be seen when juxtaposing his debut EP, "My Name Is Clint", with his 1964 release "The Man With No Name".

Balinfainte also made efforts to incorporate various world musics in his compositions, acknowledging the underappreciation and lack of recognition sometimes afforded to the various genres around the world that shared a common influence from West Africa. This connection was also often explored through his regular mentions of the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on the African diaspora. Balinfainte openly acknowledges the influence of Marcus Garvey on his thinking in this regard.

Perhaps the most notable theme present in Balinfainte's music is his desire to be a voice for the downtrodden. Having lived through the Great Depression in Jamaica, seeing the rise of the Jamaica Labour Party, and then leaving the country in search of greater opportunity, there is a personal touch to his work featuring his speech on the topic of poverty and what he perceived to be its causes. The most obvious reference to his activism, however, is present on the 1968 compilation album "Like a Panther", which he contributed to alongside several other musicians and poets in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Personal life

Balinfainte married Margarita Lynch in 1940, and the two had three children before his move to England. They would later join him in England in 1954. He also had a daughter, Lucille (born 1938), from a previous relationship. The youngest of his three children, Clinton Jr., had some success as a professional boxer in the 1960s.

Lucille's grandson Antoine – born two years after Balinfainte's death – would eventually be inducted into the ISFL Hall of Fame, while Antoine's son Raphael would direct a short film chronicling Balinfainte's life and music.

Selected discography

EPs as leader

• My Name Is Clint (1953)
• Cookin' with Clint (1954)
• Fire Water and a Cool Breeze (1957)

Albums as leader or co-leader

• Vision (1959)
• Forward (1961)
• The Man With No Name (1964)
• Global South (1965)
• Xaymaca (1967)
• Space Cowboy (1969)
• The Second Line (1971)

Collaborations

• Humming Birdsong with The Skylarks (1956)
• Dear Mama Africa with Hugh Masekela (1960)
• Música Universitária with Martinho da Vila (1964)
• Novo Novo with Hermeto Pascoal (1966)
• Dos Islas with Mongo Santamaría (1972)
• Clint & Os Cariocas (1975)
• Universal Truth with Flora Purim (1977)

Compilation albums

• Like a Panther with various others (1968)
• Ubuntu (1976)
• Legacy (1979)
• Clint Eclectic (1981)