Teino Evans, Staff Reporter

Robbie Lyn - Contributed

After a lifetime of creating rich, harmonic music for various artistes in a career that spans more than three decades, keyboard player, composer and arranger, Robbie Lyn, has finally embarked upon his own personal venture, the result being a well-orchestrated album, Making Notes.

Lyn's debut album, strictly an instrumental, features top-class musicians such as brothers, Glen and Dalton Browne, Robert Browne (Glen's son), Sly Dunbar, Dwight Pinkney, Cat Coore, Mikey Chung, Dean Fraser, the late Errol Hird, Everald Gayle, Nambo Robinson, David Madden, Earl 'Chinna' Smith, Chico Chin and Uziah 'Sticky' Thompson on percussion, with Pam Hall and Nadine Sutherland providing harmony.

Despite this all star line-up of musicians making their contribution, Lyn says, "it's still early" to determine how the album will be received.

Informal release

"The release was informal and we started receiving some copies for sale in mid-December. We were supposed to have a launch, but that seems to be delayed because of some logistic reasons," Lyn said.

He says there are "about five originals on the album and other songs that I covered were favourites like Wild World and I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Mind and I decided to put my touch to it. But these are songs that people can relate to, whether Jamaicans or an international audience."

Some of the tracks on Musical Notes have already caught the attention of other performers, as Lyn says Freddie McGregor used the intro for Soulful Strut on one of his hit songs.

But for the man who has had so much experience in music, having been a member of Peter Tosh's 'Word, Sound and Power' backing band for six years and participated in the historic 'One Love Peace Concert', Lyn says "the sky is the limit."

And, for his latest personal project, his hope "is to get it out, market it properly and some years down the road, for it to still have some listenership and still be appreciated".

pleasant to listen to

Lyn acknowledges that "although the young people nowa-days are a little harder to please, I still feel that people who appreciate a certain standard of music and love to hear melodic or harmonic music should find this (album) pleasant to listen to. It's just that the age group seems to be 40 and over, but I still hope we'll get a mixture."

Despite focussing on the promotion of his new album, Lyn says he still freelances as an instrumentalist. "Occasionally you will catch me on a live show, whether Startime or a show like that. For most of last year I was on tour with Third World in Europe and U.S. Sunsplash and Japan, and there were little one-off Caribbean shows," he said.

Lyn acknowledges that "although the young people nowadays are a little harder to please, I still feel that people who appreciate a certain standard of music and love to hear melodic or harmonic music should find this (album) pleasant to listen to.