The Memberz is a Toronto reggae and dancehall band, currently burgeoning in popularity, scope, style, and size as the release date of their debut album approaches. The most recent milestone in the group's long history has been the addition of their fourth single, Addis Ababa to playlists on campus / community radio and on the CBC, while it begins to gain traction on South African broadcasts. A lyric video, dropped on the prestigious Reggaeville platform in mid-November, has so far garnered over five thousand views.
The group was midway through production on a separate reggae crossover video when CIUT DJ Chocolate heard Addis and encouraged / insisted that the band release it promptly. "It's rare to get a Canadian reggae song stuck in my head," Chocolate relates, "It's a tune that I have to listen to two or three times a day to cheer me up. It's exactly why people like me bother to do radio shows about music. I couldn't be happier about Addis Ababa."
So on a gray Sunday in December, at Toronto's MakeTheFilm studio, with a glistening brightly-lit soundstage prepared, The Memberz, their director Jim Resley, and three dancers came together to film a vibrant, contemporary visual celebration of dancehall and African heritage through movement, color, and urban aesthetics, bridging Jamaican and Canadian traditions with an afrobeat vibe.
"I like this music because it's an inheritance from Africa, and I am from Africa," says the director. He begins by spending an hour of filming Mavriq, the song's lead singer, as he articulates the lyric in close-up and stationary full frame, and then by following him in motion around the studio's blinding expanse.
Then the three dancers arrive and oil up, and, in a jumbled storeroom of cables and ladders, dress up in costumes cued to mimic the style of the artwork that accompanied the record's release. They work out patterned routines in formations that break apart and reform, reflecting the song's rhythmic flow, and perform their own freestyle expressions, breaking frequently to towel down from the intense lighting and the exertion of their movements.
After that, The Memberz take their positions to control the area and recreate a stage performance of the song, with newest Member Gavin Williamson filling in for absent drummer Ricardo Williams. The near-crisis of a snare drum, gone missing from the rented drum kit, is solved by substituting the studio clock as a replacement prop. "Great for keeping time," cracks guitarist Corby. That would be me.
Bandleader Roscoe Christie introduces the performance with a touch of the start button on an antique Casio keyboard, the instrument that virtually composed the robotic sleng teng rhythm upon which The Memberz' Addis is based. Energetic posturing from bassist Carlton Dinnall, live blowing from saxman Chris Brophy and big smiling from keyboardist Charmazel Jorman bring the song to life again and again over the next hour until it's finally time to wrap the shoot and prepare for the intense editing that will hopefully bring the day's work to the public sometime early next year. Stay tuned. Soon forward.
