April 17, 2003
Balance: Pairing music, work makes staffer a happy ‘soldier’
Music is a complex balancing act for Hainzle Malcolm.
Malcolm, a security officer at the UW Medical Center, is putting the finishing touches on his third independently produced album under the name Selassie I Soldier. This from a man who, at least twice now, has tried to suppress the creativity that brews deep inside his musically fertile soul.
“Music was something that was always in me, it’s not something I try to do,” he said. “I always tried not to do music when I was growing up.”
While living in Jamaica it was competitive swimming and hanging out on the beach that most interested Malcolm. He earned a spot on the Jamaican national swim team, but when he’d come up for air, he couldn’t help but sing. He sang so much, a friend, well-known Jamaican drummer Horsemouth Wallace, took notice and encouraged Malcolm to do something with his talents.
“One day he said to me I need to stop and get into the studio and go do it. So I got in there and I made Wild Cowboy Ninja and it went to number four on the Jamaican charts.”
That was in 1987. Then, when he moved to Seattle in 1992, he decided to shelve his music career for a while in order to just hang out and get to know the place. Big mistake.
“I would get frustrated and get mad at my family. And it was because there wasn’t any music.”
Fortunately Malcolm met Selector Tamlin, a deejay at KCMU at the time. The two formed the sound system Unity Town and had a fair amount of success locally. That success led Malcolm to form Hard Copy, a reggae band that opened for the likes of Michael Rose, Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, and others. Hard Copy also played in a number of festivals, where Malcolm got to meet artists from The Presidents of the United States of America, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine.
The band was so successful, Malcolm quit his job as an environmental services lead at Harborview Medical Center, where he had been working since arriving in Seattle. He moved to New York City and made music his full-time occupation. But just like no music was a mistake, too much music didn’t work for Malcolm either.
“When I played music all the time there was so much down time, so much time to get into trouble,” Malcolm said. “There was nothing to do. I’d wake up at 10 o’clock in the morning and not have a show until 10 o’clock at night. So what do you do with all that time?”
He says he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. So he took a break from music and pondered his next move. He spoke with his family and his friends. He searched long and hard.
“Then I remembered that some of the happiest times I had was when I had a job and was doing all these things with music at the same time. I was so creative because I didn’t have down times. I didn’t have time to just goof off.”
He asked for his job back at Harborview, got it and then a few months later made the move to the UW campus. Today he prides himself on doing a good job as a security officer at the medical center. He says he enjoys the work and his colleagues. He definitely appreciates the steady income.
But there’s more to it than that. The job also helps him as a musician.
“I started working and then like three months later I called my friend up and said, ‘I’m ready to do this album.’”
When he’s at work, he says, he’s focused on the job and only the job. So when he changes out of his security officer uniform and heads home the music flows freely in his brain. In fact, as he’s getting ready to release Brutal to be Crucial this spring, Malcolm says he’s also preparing to produce two more albums.
He hopes to have a total of five Selassie I Soldier albums out in the public realm about the time his daughter Aminta, born last September, turns 3. By then, he figures he might be ready to tour again in support of the recordings.
He also hopes people will have warmed up to the music by then. There are songs on the albums that people immediately like, but there are others that shock the listener. That was intentional, Malcolm says.
“I’m not doing music the public necessarily would like to hear right now, but music the public will accept in the future,” he said. “I try to be a little bit ahead of the game. It’s like trying to create music that will make people stop and go, ‘Whoa! What is that? What is that sound?’ That’s what I try to do on the album.”
And he tries to do it in his live performances too. Malcolm, mild-mannered and affable when he dons his security officer uniform, often performs live with a painted face and wearing army fatigues. It’s all part of an intense atmosphere he tries to create during a show.
“If you come to my show just to be entertained, you shouldn’t come. You should come to my show to learn something. You should come to my show with an open mind. I always come from a different perspective.”
