Remembering Jon Lucien

A Song for Lucien (for Jon Lucien 1942-2007)
by Mark Anthony Neal

That Jon Lucien’s name is rarely evoked in casual conversation about Jazz and Soul vocalists of the past two generations is perhaps fitting for an artist who was often cast as an outsider. It wasn’t just the affectations of the Caribbean male that marked Lucien as an outsider when he first emerged in 1970 with his debut recording I Am Now, but his embodiment of something else—that something else that few, including his record labels, could ever quite wrap their heads around. If so much of the Soul music of the early 1970s yearned for the trinkets of a newly formed freedom—including the freedoms derived from uninhibited sexual passion—then Jon Lucien’s music, his rich Caribbean baritone and his cosmopolitan swagger were evidence of an always, already freedom.

It was all too easy to compare Jon Lucien to Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass and, much later, Luther Vandross (the sheer heft of their vocals would have it no other way), but in reality Lucien’s peers were song stylists like Johnny Hartman and Jimmy Scott—both tragically forgotten, even as Scott (and his natural falsetto) continues to toil in obscurity and Hartman remains the only vocalist to have collaborated with John Coltrane. What distinguished Lucien from those men was his ability to translate the gravitas of their instruments into something that was accessible and tangible, albeit “foreign” in both the literal and commercial sense, to audiences in the 1970s.

Simply put, Jon Lucien conjured sex in a way that was only comparable to the onscreen work of the late Calvin Lockhart - who, like his Caribbean contemporary, never quite found the vehicles to support his considerable talents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was difficult for male Caribbean artists to exist beyond the huge shadows of Sir Sidney and King Harry; Lucien and Lockhart, I would argue, suffered accordingly. Ironically Lucien first came to the states in the 1960s playing bass in the Catskills behind a trio that once performed as part of the Harry Belafonte Folk Singers.

Nevertheless Lucien’s second recording, Rashida (1973), with its lush arrangements, unbridled percussive energies and Lucien’s vocals in fine form, ranks as one of the great “Soul” albums from the period. And yet to call Lucien’s music “soul” or “jazz” does a disservice to the music. This is something that was not lost on Lucien as he struggled with his record company at the time. As Lucien told Richard Harrington a few years ago, “There was a lack of vision, especially when we did the Rashida album… everybody was saying, ‘what do we call this music?’” Such questions kept RCA from giving Lucien’s recordings full promotional support, particularly in an era when many labels were still getting a handle on their nascent black music divisions. If the music didn’t sound like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, The O’Jays or Aretha Franklin, many labels didn’t believe there was an audience for it.

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