Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 164 pp., paperback, 2021) is the biography of the Vincentian poet-jazz musician Ellsworth McGranahan “Shake” Keane (1927-1997). Keane is St Vincent’s best-known (perhaps its only) poet with an international reputation. Less known is the fact that he is most likely St Vincent’s most accomplished jazz musician. Written by Barbadian-based Vincentian author Philip Nanton, this biography, though brief, is thoroughly researched, and is erudite in content and style.
In the first chapter, Nanton describes the interactions between him and Shake in St Vincent in 1979, and offers an introductory summary of the book’s content. Thereafter, beginning with the second chapter, the book becomes for the most part a chronological account.
Chapter Two offers a distillation of Shake’s life in St Vincent up to age twenty-five. We learn of the social conditions in which he grew up; that it was a society effervescing with the desire to remove the shackles of colonial control; that his father, employing a very regimented pedagogy, taught all of his children music, especially to play the trumpet, and made them part of the Keane Family Band, with Shake having his first public performance at age six. We follow Shake’s musical evolution in St Vincent, his schooling, both religious and secular, as well as his beginnings as a poet working with other poets in St Vincent and the English-speaking Caribbean. And we learn that the name Shake, which came to eclipse his baptismal names, derives either from his love of literature, hence from Shakespeare, or his love of music, in particular Duke Ellington’s “Chocolate Shake.”
Shake’s work at the BBC is dealt with briefly in Chapter Three, but the primary focus here is on his musical development in London, where, as a member of the Joe Harriot Quintet, he learned to master the flugelhorn, integrated it into jazz, and contributed to the establishment of free form jazz in Europe. This chapter is notable as well for its descriptive detail. But Shake’s artistic success in London wasn’t matched by financial success, so he decided to try Germany, where (Chapter Five) he had the promise of stable work for three years. This was followed by his working with different bands in Europe. It is in this chapter that Nanton describes what could be called Shake’s philandering, his marriages and liaisons, and his children, whom he neglected.
Riff's fifth Chapter focuses on the segment of Shake’s life that most people have at least heard about: his return to St Vincent to head the newly created post of cultural officer. Shake’s experience is often cited as a cautionary tale to intellectuals who, having left the Caribbean’s insular, conservative societies and spent decades in Europe or North America, decide to return. If Riff were a tragedy, this chapter would be its crisis. It shows how politics can assume a tribal allure and purge itself of aliens. Chapter Six, describing Shake’s move to New York and living there as an undocumented alien, would be the tragedy’s denouement.
Nanton, himself a poet who prior to writing this biography was involved in several projects promoting Shake’s works, brings extensive knowledge to his discussion of the poetry, especially where the poems evince jazz aesthetics. He focuses, too, on the linguistic playfulness inherent in the poems. “Shake’s most significant achievement,” according to Nanton—and most would agree—was a blurring of the boundaries between these two art forms.” Suffice it to say that, because of the militaristic way in which Shake was raised, there’s fruitful matter here as well for Freudian literary critics.
Obviously, in writing this biography, Nanton believes that Shake Keane’s legacy should be preserved. There’s a bust of Keane in St Vincent, and the University of the West Indies Open Campus Poetry Prize is named in his honour. The promise of a Vincentian literature that Shake, Owen Campbell and Danny Williams proclaimed in the 1950s is still to be achieved, but this biography reminds us that it is still alive.
H. Nigel Thomas is an award-winning Vincentian essayist, poet and novelist who resides in Montreal.
