By Noah Schaffer

The band’s potent, percussive sound was years ahead of its time, as proven by today’s red hot London jazz scene, whose biggest stars are audibly influenced by Cymande.

There are a lot of surprises in Getting It Back, the new documentary about the ’70s British Afro-Caribbean funk band Cymande. But maybe the biggest surprise is that it took this long for someone to make a film about the group and its unique story.

The band’s potent, percussive sound was years ahead of its time, as proven by today’s red hot London jazz scene, whose biggest stars are audibly influenced by Cymande. The group took off in America, where it toured with Al Green, played the Apollo, and here in Boston appeared at Paul’s Mall the same December 1973 week that Muddy Waters and Buddy Rich were booked into the club. But at home Cymande found little airplay or industry interest, and disbanded in the mid-70s. Decades later, its members discovered that their music had become a significant part of the foundation of hip-hop, thanks to sampling. Enthusiastic younger audiences, who’d heard those samples or found Cymande records in the used record store crates, led to the band reuniting to make a record and then go out on extensive tours.

All of those lows and highs are captured in the endearing, lovingly made documentary Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, which will receive its Boston premiere at the Regent Theatre in Arlington on Wednesday. The Arts Fuse recently talked with Cymande founders bassist Steve Scipio and guitarist Patrick Patterson via Zoom.

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The Arts Fuse: Many of the musicians from the Windrush generation played straight ahead jazz or reggae. What made you want to branch out and create such a distinctive sound?

Patrick Patterson: Can I ask why you use that term Windrush generation, where you got it from?

AF: I’ve often seen it applied both to the group and to the British Caribbean community of that era. Do you not consider yourself part of that generation? Descendants?

Patterson: That’s a media concept, it just narrows our community here into something that it shouldn’t be narrowed into. It really speaks to a period where a lot of Caribbean people traveled to the UK in the ’50s to work and eventually some of them made a life. That term has currency because of the awareness, in the last few years, of political unfairness. Those who came had been assured that their immigration status was OK. It turned out 50 or so years later that the British government decided they needed paperwork. People involved suffered terrible injustices.

Steve Scipio: They try to condense it all into the Windrush generation. We came later. It must be remembered that there was an active movement from the Home Office to go to the Caribbean and recruit people because of the skills gap that resulted from the Second World War. One of the country’s greatest racists, Enoch Powell, was one of the greatest instigators regarding going to the Caribbean to recruit people. Then in the ’60s he flipped and said “send them back.”

Patterson: And it has to be remembered that Caribbean people, many of them, had already come to Great Britain way before the 1958 arrival of the Windrush, made their homes and their lives here and all sorts of things. But that’s politics. You’re asking us about music!

Scipio: Those different styles were already in us. When I left the Caribbean I was 12 or 13, so I already had the calypso within me, and also American soul music, because that was what was being listened to in the Caribbean. When I went to the UK, I met Patrick in the UK because our parents knew each other and were living a few doors apart in the same street. And then when we started playing music or dabbling in music in our early teens we were experimenting with different sounds.

And one of the first groups we had was a band called Meter which, in fact, was a jazz band, coming back to the first question you raised. It was called Meter because we were experimenting with time signatures. In fact, you’ll find on one of the Cymande albums that interest carried over, because one of the songs there was a 5/4 song that we did. And then we played with a Nigerian band that was called Ginger Johnson African Drummers. That also gave us a feel for the rhythmic elements that you may hear in the Cymande sound.

When we set out to put Cymande together we could have done what a lot of the bands were doing at the time: playing Black American soul music. We could have simply followed that, but we set out to do something original, to write our own material, and do our own thing, and see where it took the band.

AF: Revisiting these records, even though Cymande was an eight-piece band, the sound is so spare. Was that intentional?

Patterson: That sound was probably a product of the instrumentation that we had. Because it was Steve and I, bass, guitar, drums, and percussion. So we weren’t filling it up like it might have been if we had keyboards. Our focus was to maintain an underpinning of Rastafarian rhythms, Caribbean rhythms, and African rhythms. In addition to that, the three albums that we did were produced by John Schroeder, may he rest in peace. John was a fantastic producer. He positioned things with a degree of clarity that you would not have found in the work of other producers.

Scipio: The sparsity of the sound is because of the focus on the rhythmic elements. We wanted it to be very percussive. And also, I should say that Patrick is not a rock guitarist. He was more of a touch guitarist who just comes in and complements the sound where it needs to be complemented.

AF: The documentary talks about how, even though you were able to tour the US several times and play venues like the Apollo, you returned home to a difficult situation: in the UK you had a much harder time generating airplay and attention. Why do you think that was?

Patterson: The music industry of this country at that time, and to a degree even now, was not really accepting of Black music and Black musicians. We had to, if you like, fight our way through, and in those days there was limited success. We didn’t play the popular music of the day — we were going on our own track. There were a number of bands in those days who did a similar thing, but exposure for Black music and for Black musicians wasn’t that great. I don’t think they had much faith in our ability to create anything that made sense to them. But that’s the great thing about having gone to America, because we had an audience that appreciated what we had done and were trying to do, and accepted. We were experimenting with the sound also, which probably didn’t make it easy for record companies. Had we been a [white] English band, they would have been more open to giving us the opportunity for our music to be tried and to see if the public responded to it.

AF: There’s a scene where a younger fan discovers your album and unfolds the beautiful gatefold LP cover. Can you talk about how that art came about?

Patterson: Well first let me say that Steve did the artwork, although his name does not appear on it.

Scipio: As for the [logo] well, first we needed a name, and we settled on a name that was from a calypso by Lord Nelson. It was connected to our heritage. It was a word in a calypso about a competition between a dove and a pigeon about who could eat the most peppers. Cymande means dove, and the dove won through some trickery. So all of our covers contained that image of the dove. I’m not sure if the pigeon had won we would have used that for our image!

AF: What was the calypso?

Scipio: It was called “Dove and Pigeon” by Lord Nelson.

AF: Did you know Lord Nelson is still alive? He was at our Carnival here in Boston not too long ago. He’s 93.

Scipio: You’re kidding! Yes he would be that age.

AF: When did you first become aware that hip-hop acts were sampling the band?

Scipio: Well, in my case, it was through my children. They were the ones who were listening to that kind of music, and they made me aware that they were hearing snippets of our song, of Cymande, in a lot of the things they were listening to. I think the first one I heard about was the sample by the group De La Soul, and through them we became aware of the Fugees.

AF: And this story has another twist in that you both became attorneys. Did that help when it came to collecting royalties?

Patterson: What we became are barristers. But it wasn’t that big a deal for us, because we try not to represent ourselves. We’ve had arrangements with music business professionals to handle everything. In the old days attribution was a problem and it was a problem having people pay. But that doesn’t happen so much anymore. In our case we haven’t had much difficulty in that area.

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Noah Schaffer is a Boston-based journalist and the co-author of gospel singer Spencer Taylor Jr.’s autobiography A General Becomes a Legend. He also is a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and spent two decades as a reporter and editor at Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and Worcester Magazine. He has produced a trio of documentaries for public radio’s Afropop Worldwide, and was the researcher and liner notes writer for Take Us Home – Boston Roots Reggae from 1979 to 1988. He is a two-time Boston Music Award nominee in the music journalism category. In 2022 he co-produced and wrote the liner notes for The Skippy White Story: Boston Soul 1961-1967, which was named one of the top boxed sets of the year by the New York Times.