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If you’re a music fan, you will know the work of David Madden, even if you don’t know the name. He is the trumpeter who played on many of the great reggae hits of Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Beres Hammond, Dennis Brown, The Heptones, Culture and Gregory Isaacs. The list goes on and on. He was one of the founder members of the Revolutionary Zap Pow, the mighty Jamaican backing band that produced some of the funkiest, most groove-charged reggae music of the 1970s. Listen to that killer brass lick on the 2008 Collie Budz hit ‘Come around’, and you’re really hearing the riddim from the 1978 tune ‘The Last War’ by Zap Pow and Beres Hammond. The Zap Pow members were musical maestros in their own right, and their tunes still sound fresh today, combining the dread of reggae with the propulsion of funk and the aching sweetness of soul. David Madden grew up in Gordon Town, a little town about two miles outside of Kingston, with his sister and mother. He got his first musical inspiration as a young boy when a travelling circus passed through Gordon Town. There was a Ferris wheel for the children, and the typical stalls of a country fair, but young Madden was drawn to the band that was playing, and found himself standing beside one of the musicians, who was playing a trumpet. Madden didn’t know what the instrument was, but he was fascinated. A few years later, in the early 1950s, a storm destroyed the Madden household, and Madden’s mother, unable to care for both children, boarded David at the Alpha Boys School in Kingston. The Alpha Boys School was run by Catholic nuns, and had a reputation for installing discipline alongside musical education, and it became the training ground of many of Jamaica’s great session musicians, especially the horn players. The Skatalites players Tommy McCook, Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore, Lester Sterling and Don Drummond were pupils at Alpha, along with Cedric Brooks, Rico Rodriguez and ‘Deadly’ Headley Bennett. When Madden first appeared at Alpha Boys School, he was wandering around his new home when he came across the school band. “I can remember walking down there and looking at these guys, and listening to this band, and somebody turned and asked me, ‘You would like to be in the band? And I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘Which instrument you want?’ So, I pointed at the one that I saw the man had, and I said, ‘That!’ So I started to learn the trumpet, I was thirteen or thereabout. I did four years in Alpha, because I left when I was seventeen.” The Jamaican Military Band regularly recruited students from the Alpha Boys School, where the pupils were able to read music and were skilled in the brass instruments that typically make up a military band. At the age of seventeen, Madden, along with Glen LaCosta and Cedric Brooks, was recruited into the Jamaican army as a musician. By the mid-sixties, Madden had left the army and was working as a session musician, travelling as far as Las Vegas to perform. While in Las Vegas, he told the theatre mananger that he could recruit a group of Jamaican musicians to play in Las Vegas, and the manager had promised him a job. On returning to Jamaica, Madden sought out Brooks, and persuaded him to start a group, for the purpose of developing an act for Las Vegas. They named the group The Mystics.
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