Cymande

A band from Balham with roots across the Caribbean

Cymande took its name from a calypso word for the dove, and the band took its sound from a mix that few other London groups of 1971 had on hand: reggae and calypso rhythms, American soul and funk, African-influenced percussion and jazz horn writing. The members called the result "Nyah Rock." The founders were bassist Steve Scipio and guitarist Patrick Patterson, who had grown up near each other in south London and played together in a jazz-fusion group called Metre. Their families came from Guyana, Jamaica and Saint Vincent, part of the generation that arrived in Britain in the postwar years.

Producer John Schroeder saw the band in a basement club in Soho in 1971, made demos and brought them to the Janus label, the Chess Records offshoot in the United States. The debut album followed in 1972, released by Alaska in Britain and by Janus in America.

Three albums and a long silence

Cymande (1972) was followed by Second Time Round (1973) and Promised Heights (1974). A fourth record, Arrival, was made around 1973 and 1974 but did not come out until 1981. In 1973 the band toured the United States in support of Al Green and played the Apollo Theater in New York, where Wikipedia reports they were the first British band to headline; another account puts the Apollo visit a year earlier. The group broke up at the end of 1974 or in 1975, depending on the source, and Scipio and Patterson went on to careers in law in the Caribbean.

The records stayed in circulation among DJs and collectors. Compilations such as The Message and Nyah-Rock kept the catalog available, and the band returned for a one-off show in 2006, then properly from 2012 with Schroeder back in the picture. They toured the United States in 2016, for the first time since the 1970s, released A Simple Act of Faith in 2015 and the album Renascence in January 2025, and played the Newport Jazz Festival that year.

The break-beat afterlife

Cymande is among the most sampled British acts of its era. Early New York DJs, among them Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, used the rhythm sections as breaks, and later producers for De La Soul, Gang Starr, EPMD, MC Solaar and many others built tracks on them. In Britain the records fed the rare-groove scene of the 1980s. The 2022 documentary Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, named for a track on the debut, traced that history.