Keith Caisey was the first baby born in 1951, and he has been a trail blazer ever since. “I never looked at myself as a follower,” Keith said. “I always wanted to be a pioneer, forging forward.”
He is known around the world for his drumming, and has been featured on more than 200 different albums, on music documentaries and has helped produce the soundtrack to several films. Last year, he studied Bata, the highest form of drumming in Cuba and was awarded a Professorship in Ethnomusicology from Conjunta De Folklorica de Cuba in Havana, Cuba, by the Cuban Ministry of Culture. Although he has performed with everyone from Gladys Knight, and Arthur Connolly to The Rolling Stones, he said that recognition in his own country has been a long time coming.
Keith started performing at the age of 13, with his father, Howard Caisey, also a percussionist who worked in the Jungle Room, alongside Harold Webb, Robert Smith, and others. The Jungle Room featured the Al Harris Trio, and was located right next to Casablanca Coffee shop across from Caisey’s Bar. He was so young when he started playing the congas on Bermuda’s music scene that he was too young to actually be admitted to venues like the Clayhouse Inn or The Forty Thieves Club. He remembers sitting with his father and brother, Anthony, sipping tall glasses of coke and watching performances by various musicians. When he grew a little older, he worked with such bands as Neptune’s Domain, the Tropicanos and the Bermuda Folklore Company, among others.
Although some might see a lack of formal education as a liability, Mr. Caisey said it gave him an amazing sense of freedom and the opportunity to fully develop his talents. In 1969, he moved to New York City to play with Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre Institute of Action Arts. One of their gigs was the ground-breaking 1970 First Congress of African People at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where such people as Louis Farrakhan, a very young Rev. Jesse Jackson, Malcolm X and Angela Davis spoke and performed. He remembered how on the day that Louis Farrakhan arrived, Morehouse College went into his security mode. No one was allowed outside the college.
“The hallways were swept clean regardless of colour,” said Keith. “Obviously, Louis Farrakhan was someone who was about to become very popular.”
Mr. Caisey spent more than a year touring with the National Black Theatre. Although he enjoyed the cultural offerings of New York at that time, the violence of the city frightened him and he moved on. He went on to live in England where he played at such prestigious venues as the Q Club and The London Palladium. He said he never got tired of travelling, and his best friend was his suitcase and passport. “The world started to open up and I started to see how diverse the genre was that I had chosen,” he said. “I left Bermuda at an early age thinking I knew a lot, then I realised I didn’t know anything and started to learn from the masters.”
After touring France and Canada, he went to Australia. There, he was taken under the wing of several great players, and he performed on records such as ‘Underneath the Colours’ with Inxs, Mariah Carey, Australian rockband, Sherbet, and with singer Sammy Gaha. He was also a member of the Australian music band ‘Ayers Rock’ for a time. He spent the 1990s working in Queensland, Australia, performing and teaching workshops. He was elected writer full member of the Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA). One of his specialties became craning traditional instruments like the didgeridoo and the African kora. He became so proficient, that he was awarded an ambassadorship by the aboriginal people of Australia. He felt that making the instrument himself gave him a deeper connection to the music he makes.
After performing at the 2000 Sydney summer Olympics, his family convinced him to finally move back to Bermuda after several decades abroad. As a young man he left Bermuda with a set of bongos under his arm, and returned ten years ago with an entire shipping container full of ethnic instruments. This was after he’d given a large portion of his collection to museums in Australia. Back in Bermuda, for several years he ran a company in Dockyard called ‘Rhythm Nation’, one of the first of its kind in Bermuda. The business took children from the streets and taught them drum rhythms. Tourists often popped in from the cruise ships to learn drum work and samba dancing. Eventually, he had to close, because of the worsening tourism industry. The lack of venues for musicians on the island is something he felt very strongly about.
Keith has two daughters, Libity and Alexandra.
