It’s rare in music for an artist to have a second act, and even more so to be recognized for their undeniable impact on entire genres. But it does happen, as is the case with Cymande, a footnote British psychedelic funk outfit from the early ‘70s who later found themselves as one of the building blocks to the foundation of hip-hop, along with being an influence on the UK’s underground rare groove scene.
Guitarist Patrick Patterson and bassist Steve Scipio, childhood friends whose families immigrated to England from Guyana, formed the sprawling collective Cymande in 1971 London after spending time in the jazz fusion scene. Feeling stymied by the region’s racism and xenophobia, especially towards a group whose lyrics delivered socially conscious messages, they called it quits just three years after getting started. Patterson and Scipio retreated to the Caribbean, where they each pursued a career as a lawyer.
Then, a funny thing happened. New generations discovered the music spread across the first few Cymande records, with up-and-coming artists cherry-picking elements of it for breakbeats and samples. The band became an essential go-to for burgeoning and established hip-hop artists, from the Sugarhill Gang and Kool Herc to Gang Starr and Wu-Tang Clan. Scipio was caught off guard when his son approached him after noticing pieces of his father’s music throughout the music he was hearing in the mid-’90s.
“I wasn’t really listening to hip-hop or rap or any of that stuff that was going on at the time,” Scipio says…
Read the rest of this piece over at Vanyaland, where Scipio and I go deep into the lasting legacy of Cymande, the documentary on the band, Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, and what he’s most looking forward to at the Newport Jazz Festival. Also, here’s one of my favorites from the early days of the group, “Brothers on the Slide.”
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The Chronicles of Michael Christopher 
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