For Jamaican singer/songwriter Grub Cooper, music is not only the universal language but also the fastest way to reach people and touch their emotions.
And for Cooper, the music has to be accessible to all.
During the past 40 years Cooper has reached deep into the heart of Jamaicans with more than a thousand musical compositions, many of them written and performed as a member of one of Jamaica’s top performing acts, the Fabulous 5.
Now Cooper is bringing his gift of songwriting to the world through a newly recorded composition written specifically for the upcoming World Council of Churches (WCC), International Ecumenical Peace Convocation, which is being held in Kingston, Jamaica 17-25 May.
The convocation promises to bring together some 1000 people from churches around the world for a week of learning and sharing about peacemaking. The event is the culmination of the WCC Decade to Overcome Violence. It will feature the presentation of an Ecumenical Call to Just Peace.
The WCC, the Caribbean Conference of Churches and the Jamaica Council of Churches are jointly hosting the peace convocation, which will be held on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies near Kingston.
The song, Glory to God and Peace on Earth, is a song about peace. Borrowing the convocation motto as its title, the 4-minute tune offers a Caribbean flavour with a chord structure allowing for easy arrangement, Cooper said.
“I tried to achieve a simple melody because simplicity is always best,” he said in an interview in Kingston. “I left it sort of open ended that persons who would wish to put a particular idiom to it, suppose there was somebody from Spain, they probably could do it at a beat that they are comfortable with, without changing the melody. So the arrangement is not cut in stone.”
Cooper’s group, the Fab 5, will be the headliners at a peace concert in Kingston on 20 May sponsored by the Jamaica Council of Churches and the WCC.
While the peace convocation will be filled with speeches, workshops, seminars and presentations, Cooper is certain the song will have an impact and invited those attending the convocation to learn it before coming so they can sing it together.
“From time immemorial music has always had more power than the spoken word,” Cooper said. “Whenever you want to reach a population in a hurry and in an effective way music is obviously the most logical way to go.”
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