18 Facts About Shake Keane

Ellsworth McGranahan "Shake" Keane was a Vincentian jazz musician and poet.

Shake Keane is best known today for his role as a jazz trumpeter, principally his work as a member of the ground-breaking Joe Harriott Quintet.

Shake Keane was taught to play the trumpet by his father, Charles, and gave his first public recital at the age of six.

When he was 14 years old, Shake Keane led a musical band made up of his brothers.

Shake Keane had been dubbed "Shakespeare" by his school friends, on account of his love of prose and poetry.

Shake Keane worked on BBC Radio's Caribbean Voices programme, reading poetry and interviewing fellow writers and musicians.

Shake Keane began reading literature at London University by day, while playing the trumpet in London nightclubs, working in a number of styles including cabaret, highlife, soca, mento, calypso and jazz.

Harriott's group was the first in Europe, and one of the first worldwide, to play free jazz, and Shake Keane contributed mightily to the band's artistic success, thanks to his fleet and powerful improvisatory skills on trumpet and flugelhorn.

Shake Keane made a small handful of records under his own name, but these were usually light jazz, a world away from his work with Harriott and Garrick.

Shake Keane became featured soloist with the Kurt Edelhagen Radio Orchestra, and joined the pre-eminent European jazz ensemble of the 1960s, The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band.

At some point, Shake Keane formed a relationship with Scots-born Elizabeth Uma Ramanan, with whom he had a son, Roland Ramanan, in 1966, by which time Shake Keane had left for Germany to join Edelhagen's orchestra.

In 1981, Shake Keane moved to New York City, settling the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Shake Keane did not return full-time to music until 1989, when he rejoined Michael Garrick and his old band mates Coleridge Goode and Bobby Orr for a tour in honour of Joe Harriott.

In 1991, Shake Keane appeared in a BBC Arena documentary with the Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, filmed by Anthony Wall.

Shake Keane had reestablished contact with Margaret Bynoe, an academic who hailed from St Vincent.

Thanks to an old friend and colleague from the BBC in the 1950s, Erik Bye, Shake Keane established a regular pattern of work in Norway from 1991 to his death.

Shake Keane contributed music to Norwegian television and stage productions for the next few years, touring the country playing jazz.

Shake Keane himself had selected the poems for inclusion but died before publication.