Restoring The Chills

The music sounds like the future and the past. Shivery acoustic guitar on top of spare, steady percussion with a high, husky voice piercing through it all. "In high seas or low seas/ I'm gonna be your friend..." Something about that voice--tremulous, tender, tough--recalls Bob Marley, more than a little bit. But check out the album credits. It's actually Stephen, one of Bob's sons, performing a remake of his father's classic High Tide or Low Tide. The song is one of many bewitching moments on Spirit of Music, the latest CD by Ziggy Marley (another son of Bob's) and his siblings Stephen, Cedella and Sharon, known collectively as the Melody Makers.

Ziggy Marley, now 30, and the family band have been making music for more than a decade. But Ziggy always felt that something was missing. "The best part of the music was never heard by the people," he says. "Because the best part is the beginning--when I'm sitting down writing the music with an acoustic guitar. There's so much feeling, so much chills. We wanted to get that across." To bring back the chills, the group brought in veteran producer Don Was (a respected studio vet who has worked with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones) to help it capture the essence of the music, to strip away studio trickery and pop excess. The group has worked with outside producers before--Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the rock group Talking Heads produced its 1988 album, Conscious Party--but the result this time is the most focused and mature of the band's career so far.

Although the CD features two Bob Marley covers--in addition to High Tide or Low Tide, there's You Got My Love (All Day All Night)--it also boasts a number of smartly conceived and performed originals. Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, at the start of their career, were known for a kind of brightly colored pop reggae. On the new album the songs are mostly shadowy and introspective; the instrumentation is low key, and the vocals are tinged with the blues. Many of the songs feel beautifully unvarnished, presented to the world in the rough. Marley hopes they capture the "beginning" sound he was searching for. Says he: "If we didn't get it now, we're very, very close."

One of the best songs on the album is a memorable Ziggy Marley original titled Many Waters. The song has a rolling reggae rhythm and a funky bass groove, with Ziggy's murmured, soulful vocals smoothly layered on top. As in the band's cover of High Tide or Low Tide, there's a prayerful feel. The song never explodes; it builds and yearns and pushes on. Cedella and Sharon Marley add soft, sweet backup vocals. The song's sleek lines are evidence of the band's ever sharpening skills and broadening artistic ambition--pop melodies no longer satisfy. They're looking to create moods, evoke feelings, go deeper.

Bob Marley was a poet of the Third World, one of the great musical artists of the century, a tough legacy to live up to, but his children are giving it their all. For the Marley family, the tide is coming in.