Tommy McCook

4 March 1927 – 5 May 1998.
Very important Jamaican saxophone player, who was a founding member of The Skatalites and The Supersonics.
McCook was born in Havana, Cuba. When his father worked on the Panama Canal, the family moved to Jamaica in 1933. McCook went to Alpha School, famed for giving good musical eductions. His career started in 1943 when he performed in Eric Dean Orchestra, one of the best in Jamaica at that time. He then switched to Don Hitchman's sextet, one of the first jamaican bands ever recorded (1952/1953), at the first radio station in Jamaica, Z or Zed QI. In the early fifties, Tommy was a soloist in the greatest band to coalesce in Jamaica before The Skatalites, Roy Coburn's Blu-Flames, featuring Don Drummond, Cluett Johnson and Ken Williams. In 1954 he moved to Nassau, Bahamas to play gigs in clubs with Ernest Ranglin. In 1956, he moved to Miami, Florida, where he first came into contact with jazz. He was heavily influenced by hearing John Coltrane, whose tunes he first played when he moved back to Jamaica in 1962. He played with a lot of musicians on early ska recordings, but until 1964 he was always denied offers by Clement "Coxsone" Dodd and Arthur "Duke" Reid. He was a known musician for adding jazz touches to ska. On Sundays, he always went to play regular sessions with other musicians, like Jackie Mittoo, Lloyd Knibbs and Johnny Moore, which later got released as Jazz Jamaica (US) (opens in a new tab). Out of this session emerged one of Jamaica's most important bands, Skatalites(June 1964). They made several hundred instrumental recordings, mostly for Dodd's Studio One, and backed the whole gamut of Jamaica's vocalists on hundreds more. After Don Drummond murdered his girlfriend in 1965, they split up. McCook then produced records for Reid's Treasure Isle. At that point, he started his new band, the Supersonics. McCook led them until they disintegrated on a trip to Montreal in Canada, in 1969. In 1973, he went to the UK to work with Jimmy Cliff's band for a BBC special on Cliff meeting jazz artist Herbie Mann. After 1975 he played un Channel One's studio band, the Revolutionaries. In 1983, McCook started to reanimate the Skatalites, and they saw that they could make out a living of touring. He stopped playing around 1995, when his health got worse. He died on May 5, 1998, leaving his second wife, eight children and fourteen grandchildren.