A Song for Lucien (for Jon Lucien 1942-2007)
“I would say that my sound is a romantic sound. It’s water. It’s ocean. It’s tranquility.”—Jon Lucien
That Jon Lucien’s name is rarely evoked in casual conversation about Jazz and Soul vocalists of the past two generations is perhaps fitting for an artist who was often cast as an outsider. It wasn’t just the affectations of the Caribbean male that marked Lucien as an outsider when he first emerged in 1970 with his debut recording I Am Now, but his embodiment of something else—that something else that few, including his record labels, could ever quite wrap their heads around. If so much of the Soul music of the early 1970s yearned for the trinkets of a newly formed freedom—including the freedoms derived from uninhibited sexual passion—then Jon Lucien’s music, his rich Caribbean baritone and his cosmopolitan swagger were evidence of an always, already freedom.
It was all too easy to compare Jon Lucien to Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass and, much later, Luther Vandross (the sheer heft of their vocals would have it no other way), but in reality Lucien’s peers were song stylists like Johnny Hartman and Jimmy Scott—both tragically forgotten, even as Scott (and his natural falsetto) continues to toil in obscurity and Hartman remains the only vocalist to have collaborated with John Coltrane. What distinguished Lucien from those men was his ability to translate the gravitas of their instruments into something that was accessible and tangible, albeit “foreign” in both the literal and commercial sense, to audiences in the 1970s.
Simply put, Jon Lucien conjured sex in a way that was only comparable to the onscreen work of the late Calvin Lockhart - who, like his Caribbean contemporary, never quite found the vehicles to support his considerable talents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was difficult for male Caribbean artists to exist beyond the huge shadows of Sir Sidney and King Harry; Lucien and Lockhart, I would argue, suffered accordingly. Ironically Lucien first came to the states in the 1960s playing bass in the Catskills behind a trio that once performed as part of the Harry Belafonte Folk Singers.
Nevertheless Lucien’s second recording, Rashida (1973), with its lush arrangements, unbridled percussive energies and Lucien’s vocals in fine form, ranks as one of the great “Soul” albums from the period. And yet to call Lucien’s music “soul” or “jazz” does a disservice to the music. This is something that was not lost on Lucien as he struggled with his record company at the time. As Lucien told Richard Harrington a few years ago, “There was a lack of vision, especially when we did the Rashida album… everybody was saying, ‘what do we call this music?’” Such questions kept RCA from giving Lucien’s recordings full promotional support, particularly in an era when many labels were still getting a handle on their nascent black music divisions. If the music didn’t sound like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, The O’Jays or Aretha Franklin, many labels didn’t believe there was an audience for it.
That Lucien had such an enduring following up until his death, was a tribute to the beauty and exquisiteness of those early recordings. Tracks like “Dindi” and Lucien originals like “Lady Love,” “Esperanza,” “Luella” and “Rashida” were simply gems, but many didn’t discover them until a decade after they were recorded and then only because of developments like the “Quiet Storm” radio format. “Rashida” in particular became one of Lucien’s signature tracks. “Gentle as the sigh of a morning breeze/Rashida calls my name” is how Lucien opens the song as he proceeds to tell a true story about a love lost. The song’s tension comes from “Rashida’s” return and Lucien’s lament that “when I needed you/you ran away…now your body’s yearning for my touch.” When asked about the song’s popularity, Lucien told Essence some years after “Rashida’s” release, “I don’t know. I guess the time that song came out there was no music like that around. Back then, black men were not singing songs with those kind of lyrics.”
Despite the brilliance of Lucien’s early recordings, he never found the audience he deserved. A subsequent move to CBS, which produced the stellar recordings Song for My Lady and Premonition (which included a lovely remake of Bill Withers’s “Hello Like Before”), did little to enhance Lucien’s sales. With Disco dominating the airwaves of black radio in the late 1970s (Lucien was of course never positioned to cross over), Lucien retreated into a world of depression and cocaine addiction. Reflecting on those years, Lucien told Essence in 1991, “The truth is, I was scared of the business. By the time I made my fifth album I began to realize that that I was doing all the music and coming up with all the ideas…I should’ve been getting producer credit. I just thought, I’ve gotta get out of here.” Lucien’s depression was exacerbated by the drowning death of his infant daughter. It would be nearly a decade before Lucien released another studio recording as he healed emotionally and physically back in the Virgin Islands, where he was born.
Lucien was in the midst of a fairly successful return (at least by smooth jazz standards) when he was forced to bury another daughter. Dalila, Lucien's 17-year-old daughter, was a passenger on the ill-fated TWA 800, which crashed in July of 1996. Saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s wife also perished in the crash; Shorter was Lucien's brother-in-law from an earlier marriage. Like so many of his fans, Lucien found comfort in his music, recording much of 1997's Endless Love while he was in mourning. In the liner notes to the album, which was dedicated to Dalila and all who perished on TWA 800, Lucien wrote, “My infinite love, Dalila: I have always been your father and will continue to be, throughout all our lifetimes, on earth and in forever after. Visit me soon, my darling. You are my music.” And indeed in the last decade of his life, Lucien recorded some of the most personal music of his career, making the break from the dictates of the mainstream labels and founding his own label, Sugar Apple.
Lucien spent much of his later years battling kidney disease—he received a transplant a few years ago—and ultimately it was complications from that disease that called him home. Lucien bravely told Richard Harrington back in 2003 that “I’m not going anywhere until the Lord wants me.” And apparently on August 18, 2007, the Lord had need of a rich Caribbean baritone, but as Lucien told his own Dalila, the spirit of Jon Lucien will live on in his song.
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Comments
1.
Nica says:
Thank you. I enjoyed reading your article and found it to be the most informative. I have looked all over for a picture of Dalila but have only found the one on his site but it is not clear. May he rest in peace. I miss him.
09/01/2007 at 3:03 PM