Black History Soars on the Wings of Cymande

Catch Exclusive Documentary Screening Before Portland Performance

By Jake Ten Pas

In 2016, I flew to San Francisco just to see Cymande. The pioneering British band hadn’t toured the U.S. since 1973, three years before I was born, but its heady mix of funk, rock, soul, reggae, and Caribbean and African influences called to me through the intervening years like an errant TV broadcast bouncing off a satellite and returning to Earth. Pump up the volume, indeed.

My first musical love was hip-hop, and it was through this lens that I discovered much of the great Black music of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s; Cymande included. From De La Soul to Wu-Tang Clan to The Coup, Cymande samples provided the beats and basslines to some of the most formative music of my adolescence. Not to sound even older than I am, but back in those pre-Internet days, we had to work a lot harder to seek out the sources of such samples. Here in 2025, a simple Google search can tell you almost every artist who’s ever sampled Cymande. Fortunately for MAC members, the effort required to learn about Cymande and experience them live has been similarly minimized. In honor of Black History Month, the club is hosting a screening of the documentary Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 8. A Cymande-inspired playlist, appetizers, and two hosted drink tickets sweeten the deal, but trust me when I say the music and inspiration would be worth the price of admission if the event wasn’t already free. Now, a bit more about the music.

The band’s members were part of an AfroCaribbean diaspora community living in London, and it’s the influence of this heritage that gives Cymande its unique sound. Rastafarian rhythms and chants swirl together with slow-burning, rock-influenced instrumentals. Superfly-esque basslines, bouncing horns, and African percussion instruments keep most of the proceedings profoundly danceable. Elements of Calypso, Latin music, and New Orleans-style funk only add to the singularity of the sound.

I firmly believe that the period of time between 1967 and 1977 was the greatest single decade in popular music. Since I was only alive for one of those years — and don’t think my parents piped music into my crib — it’s safe to say this isn’t just nostalgia wagging its tone-deaf tongue. Following the increasingly adventurous leads of trailblazers ranging from The Beatles to John Coltrane, musicians of many genres started reaching for new heights of sophistication and risk-taking. Rock, pop, blues, R&B, jazz, classical, and folk music swirled together into new hybrid forms.

Given the staggering volume of great music released during their era, it’s impressive that Cymande’s first three albums haven’t disappeared completely, and instead continue to gain new devotees. As Getting It Back illustrates, Cymande called it quits in 1974, with members going their separate ways before the band was rediscovered by British rare groove record diggers and rap DJs. The film chronicles these ups and downs while serving up plenty of what makes Cymande’s story most compelling — the music.

Their self-titled first offering is a stone classic and would appeal to fans of Santana, War, Funkadelic, Mandrill, or Osibisa — most of whom mined similar sonic veins to greater payloads of fame and fortune. Cymande’s next two long-players were nearly as good, perhaps largely suffering from the lack of an epic as profoundly soulful and propulsive as “Dove,” the first album’s undisputed star. The name Cymande is allegedly derived from a Caribbean word for dove, by the way.

As someone who believes deeply that diversity makes any group of humans — from a business to a country — stronger, I can’t help but point to music history as a powerful piece of supporting evidence. The best bands represent a confluence of ethnic and cultural traditions that together form a new river of sound. Jazz was born from the mating of African rhythms and European conceptions of harmony. Rock was created by R&B juking it out with blues, rockabilly, and pop. Hip-hop and electronic music are sometimes pastiches of so many influences that it’s difficult to define where any one of them came from.

The lasting impact of Cymande’s music serves as a reminder of what can happen when people of different interests and backgrounds get together for the sake of making art. The documentary Getting It Back shows how even the noblest of intentions can fall apart in the face of fickle public taste, bad business, and interpersonal differences, but it has a more important message, too.

As the old adage goes, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Like Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure Detroit musician whose career was reignited by the release of the documentary Searching for Sugarman, the members — and music — of Cymande have been here all along, waiting for the world to catch up to them. Through the wisdom of DJs and the power of the internet to connect us all to sounds from around the world and throughout time, Cymande’s second coming has arrived. Join us on Feb. 8 to bear witness to the power of Black music and the importance of keeping history alive.