RISE: A journey into different cultures

Jul 30, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I heard there was a new social group coming into being, but I had not even the remotest idea what its name was going to be. When I read that the title the group gave itself was RISE, memories of Canada came flashing into my consciousness like raging lightning. I went to Canada to pursue higher education in 1979. I got married months before and I had a scholarship waiting for me and my wife decided to travel with me to pursue a university education.
I went to Canada and got smitten by a song that was dominating the world in that year, RISE by Herb Alpert. I loved the music of Alpert when I was a teenager in Guyana. He played Latin ballads with his group The Tijuana Brass. At that time, there was only one radio station. Ron Robinson had a morning programme that woke you up to get to work. Ron’s repertoire would include, the English instrumental band, The Shadows, the Italian saxophonist, Fausto Papetti (my young sister was a huge fan of Papetti) and Herb Alpert.
All the time listening to Herb Alpert in Guyana, I thought he was a Latin-born musician; maybe from Mexico. Even when he made an international hit out of Burt Bacharach’s swooning, crooning ballad, “This guy’s in love with you,” I still didn’t know he wasn’t Hispanic at all. I found that he was not after his huge hit “RISE” had propelled him into greater fame. Alpert is a pure Caucasian gentleman from a white Russian father and a white American woman. He was born in New York.
RISE is the last great uptempo hit of the seventies. As the decade drew to a close, the kings of disco, Kool and the Gang, and the queen of disco, Donna Summer, were ebbing. John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever and the music from it had run their course and pop music was heading in a different direction. The eighties was dawning and Michael Jackson was about to take the world by storm. His successful album, “OFF the WALL,” at the beginning of the eighties, was a signal that he was going to be something else. By the time THRILLER became the most successful pop album in history in 1984 with 66 million copies sold, the music of the seventies with the dominating genres of easy listening, funk and disco, was going out. I would think the last great song in those categories was Herb Alpert’s “RISE.”
If I had to choose ten of my favourite songs in all genres, RISE would be one of them. Of those ten songs, three would be extraordinary instrumental melodies – Alpert’s RISE, Barry White’s LOVE THEME and David Shire’s MANHATTAN SKYLINE from Saturday Night Fever. I do not have the training in music literature to competently assess RISE, and I would love to see a review of the song. I guess there must be a review somewhere out there; it is just that I didn’t research it for this column. How to describe the arrangement of RISE? A unique combination of different layers, with an exciting fusion of uptempo jazz sprinkled with lots of disco and funk rhythms, but retaining its original mainstream smoothness.
Herb Alpert’s RISE brings back memories of my changing ideological architecture. When I left Guyana for Canada, I was a typical third world radical, suspicious of white people and enamoured with Castro’s socialism. I met people in Canada from all types of cultures, races and religions, and found out that a White man can defend a Black man and a Black man can leave a fellow Black man out in the cold.
Here is a part of my memories of RISE that will make you think I am exaggerating. I bought the album and was attracted to the clothes Alpert was wearing on the front cover. It was a light sand-brown jacket with light camel trousers. My friend from Nigeria was getting married to another friend from Belize and I wanted to wear such a jacket at the wedding. I bought it and did wear it. I brought home that jacket to Guyana and the RISE album is still in my vinyl collection at home.
My wife liked RISE, my friends at the University of Toronto liked RISE. It remains one of the biggest, nicest songs of the great seventies. I am absolutely sure that if you are a Jay-Z fan, and a reggae fanatic, if you listen to RISE, you would like it. Go to YouTube and see a young Alpert with his young wife dancing to RISE on the beach.

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