Stephen ‘Cat’ Coore

IRIE. Can you share with us the musical journey of Cat Coore?

Stephen ‘Cat’ Coore: Just looking at the journey itself, I would have to say that my music journey started with my mom. My mom was a music teacher and had actually been an island scholar. She was awarded a scholarship to McGill University. My dad was a Jamaican scholar. They both met at McGill University where my mom was pursuing a course in broadcasting and marketing but her major was music. They both went on to England where my mom studied at the BBC for awhile. My dad went on to do his law degree in Oxford.

Now when I was born, my mom was already teaching music in Jamaica and she also had a program on the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation called Concert Hall where she played classical music. She would give little tidbits about what she was playing. So by the time I was four or five years old, I already had a lot of music around me. And my mom, by virtue of some little things that she noticed about me when I was young, had always picked me as being the musician in the family. So I was always encouraged in music from a very young age. By the time I was about 8 or 9 years old, I had started to study the cello. My personal liking was when my mom kept putting on her Pablo Casals records which I immediately reacted to.

At seven years old, around that time, I had a quarter size cello which was very unusual at that time. There weren’t many quarter sizes cello at that time but by my mom went to England and saw one and she bought it for me. I was then on my way to cello-dom!

Now, I studied for a few years. I studied Bach, I studied Mozart. I played in the Jamaican Youth Orchestra. Right up to around 1968 where I became totally aware of Jamaican music. I was pretty much under the influence of the fact that everybody in the neighborhood, all my friends of my age are the older guys because when you are about nine or ten, you are looking to the older boys.

Everybody was checking out the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This was happening was pop music, the electric guitar. And in those days when I saw a guy walking on the street with an electric guitar, it freaked me out! There were stores that sold electric guitar and there was a guy down the road who had one and he was so proud, he use to walk down the street everyday. I mean, at first, I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was and when I saw it I said, my God, it’s an electric guitar! I didn’t own a guitar until several years after that. My first guitar was an acoustic guitar that my mom bought me because I kept telling her how interested I was in playing guitar. And eventually, she said, okay, I’ll buy you a guitar but you have to go and study classical guitar and take guitar lessons. Learn to read and learn to write and play and so on.

I did that for a year. While I was doing that, because of my cello background, I was able to figure out the guitar really quick. And I had a very good ear so I was able to listen to pop music on the radio and find the chords and the melodies. So it was quite easy for me to get into pockets of guys who weren’t in bands at the time but was into music and forming bands.

There was the Hell’s Angels Band down the road from me, Tomorrow’s Children, The Mighty Vikings, Byron Lee. We used to go and hear these guys play. The reaction in the crowd was incredible. That year was special to me. It was the formulation of me becoming somebody who wanted to play in a band. I started thinking about pop music and wanting to play pop music.

I remember going to see a band called the Visions. And the Visions had people like Richard Grey, Willie Stewart was the drummer. Keith Jones who became a very successful bass player, but more in Jazz and Contemporary R&B as a Jamaican guy.

We had quite an exceptional the amount of kids coming out of high school who were playing music. But in those days in Jamaica, every high school had a band that played popular music. I’m sad to say doesn’t happen anymore today. There is no more music program in the school in jamaica which is shocking even though we’re producing so many DJ’ s and so many producers. Because of the whole internet thing, there is so much interest in creating music now.