| Aikeke |
by Catherine Krantz
Aikeke Rose, (I-key-kay), is a musician you are likely to spot around town performing at area bars & restaurants, over the past few years becoming a standard of the Zihua music scene. Born on the island of St. Vincent, music has always been a driving force in Aikeke’s life and it has taken him across the globe. On St. Vincent they say he was even making music by age 2. He started studying music at the age of 6 and was a professional musician by the age of 10, when he was recruited to play drums in a large Bossa Nova and Caribbean group who’d lost their drummer. From St. Vincent he moved to New York where he grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, and NY is the place he returns to most.
Aikeke studied percussion, reed (clarinet and saxophone), music theory and direction at the Military Academy of Music in Little Creek, Virginia where he played piano and guitar with the Military Academy’s Jazz Concert band. Since then Aikeke has spent his life being musician, producer and teacher. In Brooklyn he was arranging music for singers and playing percussion for the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra. Houston, Texas found him branching into gospel where he was music director for a church and a music teacher. It is actually the Houston connection where I first knew of Aikeke, from Houston myself, he was a member of a very popular group there, Zwee and the Graveberries, and produced one of their CDs.
When I first saw Aikeke in Zihuatanejo, the friend I was with had been to a party at his house in Houston, small world, and Aikeke has seen a lot of it. A professional musician for over 20 years, he has toured across the US, Canada, Europe, Africa and Mexico. He has played back up on over 500 records and there was a time in NY when he was on every Calypso recording made. A little known fact about back up musicians that non-musicians might not know, is that back up accompaniment requires great talent, polish and flexibility. You are often expected to catch on and keep up immediately with little or no preparation and rarely music charts. A great way to hone one’s skills and he has recorded with the likes of Ruben Blades, Roland Prince, Cheryl Byron and Donald Byrd to name but a few. He has also done his fair share of festivals and that has allowed him to travel extensively. From NY’s Jazz and Classical Music Fest to Harlem’s Summer Jazz Fest, to Jazz Festivals in the Caribbean to Mexico’s Razteca Festival which traveled along the Pacific coast and on to Cancun, where he regularly played for audiences of up to 15,000 people.
A music teacher for over 15 years from kindergarten to university levels, he has conducted jazz workshops in Brooklyn and the Caribbean and has taught music right here in Zihuatanejo for three years at the Technical Institute. Aikeke owns a music publishing company, he writes, produces and arranges music and has recorded numerous CDs for himself and others. A group he played with locally, La Buena Madera, who used to be found nightly at the Bay Club on the road to La Ropa, even went to NY to record a CD. For the past 4 years has had his own 128 track digital and analog recording studio here in Zihuatanejo which produces music of local singers and musicians. One song produced locally got national airplay on FM stations throughout Mexico. Mexico is not the only place his music has been a hit, he wrote and produced music in Nigeria and Ghana, Africa where he had a hit song, amid fanfare and newspaper articles. He has recorded 2 CDs of his own here locally, with the latest having been done completely in Zihua, from production to mixing to distribution.
He toured for years with Sinclair Burnett Jr., a Jazz saxophone player who Aikeke credits with being a great inspiration to him. He feels fortunate to have had such great teachers in his life to foster his early love of music, from his earliest teachers on St. Vincent to his greatest influences: Elsworth Keane and Chief Laster from the Military Band in Virginia.
Aikeke is a quiet unassuming man who is quick to smile. Soft spoken with the vestiges of his Caribbean accent apparent, you have to listen closely, but you can be sure he’ll be talking about music. An easy to spot figure here in Zihuatanejo, even now that he’s chopped off his dreads and stopped sporting his knitted rasta cap. Tall and thin and usually carrying an instrument or two, you’ll often see him making the rounds at the live music spots in Zihua after his own shows, trying to pick up a jam session before heading home for the night.
To find out more about Aikeke’s recording studio, you can call the studio at 044 755 556 1092. For your own copy of his latest CD, “Plain and Simple”, just talk to him. To find out when he is playing, check local listings or ask around. You can also find him every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm at Coconuts Restaurant in centro Zihuatanejo playing the xylophone and soft Jazz for the dinner crowd.
February 2003
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