Harrison, for the first time you're performing the Bob Marley tribute show in Europe. In the States it's been an annual event for years now. What was the idea behind doing these tribute shows when you started doing them all these years ago?
Harrison Stafford: "The idea was to really reinvest ourselves in the roots of the music; to try and learn from the greatest. At the same time musically speaking for us it was also a learning experience. At the time we were just starting out and it was nice to see check what the possibilities were. These days it's like a nice annual reflection, keeping us aware of where the music came from. With Groundation we tend to stray from roots reggae at times, so it's nice to be able to refresh our spirits from time to time playing Bob Marley's music. It's also a great way to celebrate the man who's probably the reason we're doing what we're doing today. Bob Marley's music had a great impact on me when I was still a kid and I guess that's also the case for a lot of people in the audience. We always try to vary our sets though; the tunes you will here tonight, you might not hear tomorrow, but that doesn't even matter because Bob's music is just a pure celebration every night!"
Do you think these tribute shows draw a different crowd then regular Groundation concerts?
Harrison Stafford: "No, I don't think so. I think most people will just notice Groundation is playing and only then realise it's a Bob Marley tribute show."
You guys just released 'The Gathering Of The Elders', a sort of Best Of compilation.
Harrison Stafford: "The reason for releasing that compilation album at this stage will become clear when we'll release our new album 'Building An Ark'. We kind of came to the end of a period in the existence of Groundation where we were focussing on roots reggae and collaborating with all these elders in the genre. These guys truly influenced and inspired us and gave us the strength to keep on doing what we were doing. Instead of just doing a "Best Of" compilation we rather opted to bring together the songs we did with these great roots artists."
For the upcoming 'Building An Ark' album you chose to work with artists that weren't necessarily connected to the world of reggae.
Harrison Stafford: "That really had to do with a certain singer, whose name I don't want to mention yet, but who was almost born to take part in this project. He just happened to be from a different musical world, but none the less can also be described as being an elder. The album could be perceived as a kind of launching pad into combining different musical worlds."
'Building An Ark', the title of the album is somewhat intriguing. An ark is always built to save or contain something precious, what would Groundation's ark be used for?
Harrison Stafford: "(laughs) It's an ark for you and me, man! The ark is for good people; all those who want to preserve life and want to see a great tomorrow. The building of this ark is going to consume a lot of energy and only few will be lucky enough to be able to enter it. This "elder" we've worked with for the album says he's been striving for this his whole life. He's lived a good life, but he's still not happy, because he wants to see as many people as possible in this ark. Good people can be found all over this earth; it's not a question of race, nationality or religion. In a way we're also trying to bring back dreams and aspirations to people who've lost all of that because they're preoccupied with the simple struggle for survival."
You've recently also released your solo-effort ‘Madness'. Where does Professor differ from the earlier side-project Rockamovya?
Harrison Stafford: "Rockamovya kind of had its roots in our Bob Marley tribute shows, where Leroy 'Horsemouth' Wallace would join us on stage regularly. Will Bernard was there as well and we felt the energy during these concerts was really something else, so we booked some studio time and started improvising. We tried some ska, some dancehall and a lot of roots reggae of course. It was one big improvised jam session if you want. The Professor project was totally different in nature; it came to be after I had travelled through Israel and Palestine and becoming moved by the things I saw there. I visited places like Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron - I walked the streets dressed in a Palestinian keffiyeh as not stick out and be recognized as being a Jew - and that trip moved me so severely that I already started to sing the songs that are now on the album into my I-phone when I was still over there. The experience left me really needing to express my feelings and the only way I really knew how was through writing these songs. One day I met this Palestinian poet in Ramallah, but when I mentioned I was a reggae musician and even mentioned Bob Marley, to my surprise he reacted negatively asking me: "Why is Bob Marley so Zionist in his message? I don't like Bob Marley; to me his message is negative!" First I was shocked by his statement, but in a way I also understood where he was coming from. Somehow though I wanted to prove him wrong, so I decided to head for Jamaica to record the songs for Professor, so I could return to Palestine and show this poet this album full of positive messages played by Jamaican reggae musicians."
We can't leave out talking about the documentary project you did, "Holding On To Jah". I think virtually every roots veteran still alive at the time of filming is in there somewhere. How did that work? Did you have a list of people you absolutely wanted to interview or did things develop naturally?
Harrison Stafford: "The director, Roger Hall, and the cinematographer Daniel Esser and myself flew to Jamaica a couple of times between 1999 and 2007. It was basically my job to organize all the interviews, but I also doubled as a driver to get us where we needed to be. (laughs) We really tried to speak to as many people as we could in the time space we had available."
I can imagine you ended up with hours and hours of valuable material. How difficult is it to distil a two hour documentary from that?
Harrison Stafford: "Man, that's really though believe me. Luckily that was mostly Roger's job. He and I sat down before we started to map out the basic storyline of the documentary, which basically became like a history of reggae music not dissimilar to the course I taught at university back in the day: a basic history of Jamaica, a short biography of Marcus Garvey, a similar biography on Haile Selassie I and the history of Rastafarianism and reggae music. What we did was really repeat the same interview over and over again with these different artists, so we could end up with as much detail as possible on the subjects we talked about. To complete the film, Roger locked himself away in a studio in Oakland, California for about a year and a half. As far as I'm concerned he did a brilliant job."
You did run into a huge amount of music rights that need to be paid for the soundtrack though. Last I read you were still on the lookout for an amount of about 100.000 dollars. How are things looking on that front?
Harrison Stafford: "Well there is light at the end of the tunnel fortunately. The film just premiered in Jamaica (at Studio 38, Kingston, red.). Roger met up with quite a few people who could be financial backers for the film and we've also been talking to Chris Blackwell and members of the Marley family, both of whom have substantial financial means at their disposition, but maybe more importantly also hold the rights to a lot of the music we used in the movie. We're not to sure yet where exactly we're heading, but there's definitely some light at the end of the tunnel. I was expecting to run into these problems though, but I didn't want it to dictate the way the film was going to go; if we're talking about Marcus Garvey, it's only logical we feature Burning Spear's song 'Marcus Garvey' to go along with that fragment. Certain songs were just crucial, so we had to use them."
The previous interviews we did together always ended on a political note, so I wanted to continue on the tradition. As an American citizen what's you're outlook on the whole "Obama killed Osama" media spectacle?
Harrison Stafford: "Well I like to celebrate life; death is never a positive thing to me. You won't hear me say Osama Bin Laden was a great person, far from that, but that doesn't mean you'll find me out in the streets celebrating the fact we killed him. I often reflect on the situation in the Middle East and on Islam in a more general sense. The Quran is a very serious book and interpreted by ultra conservative and radical people it can even become a very violent book. In comparison the Bible and the Torah, which also contain violent passages, are more like storybooks telling us about God wreaking vengeance on man. I even wonder if Islamic thinking can even go hand in hand with typically western ideologies like democracy for example. On the other side the West is also trying to demonise Islam. It's almost as if American foreign policy and Osama Bin Laden were aiming for the same thing: trying to make the Middle-East a chaotic place and drive oil prices up. A good example is the fact the American government really stressed the fact Osama Bin Laden was given a funeral in the Islamic tradition. I don't they would have bothered making that point if he would have been Christian. Also killing the head of a violent terror organisation will only inspire his young followers to try and step into his footsteps. I tend to stick to a couple of simple rules: killing is wrong and war is wrong. The American author Howard Zinn studied just about every military conflict in history and came to the conclusion that armed conflicts never solved what they need to solve. War usually benefits the rich and powerful; it's one of the biggest businesses out there, so new enemies and demons need to be created all the time!"