Now it’s time to mix celebration with elegy, a fairly normal state of affairs in the kingdom of this world.

First off for pan aficionados—congratulations to Phase II, I only wish I could have been in the Big Yard to see and more importantly to hear your triumph; secondly the two gigs I was fortunate to get to at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club to hear Andy Narell play with Brazilian duo Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, showed the man from Queens is indubitably a panjazz legend and for those who require listening proof let me recommend his CD The Passage recorded with such luminary guests as Hugh Masakela, Paquito D’Rivera and Michael Brecker (you just don’t get to play with these guys if you’re not in the maestro class); thirdly and now we move into elegiac mode, let me introduce you to the Big Fug-based Nostalgia Steelband, who played my good Dominican partner Marcel D’Jamala Fontaine to his grave yesterday and then went on to delight all who attended the post burial reception.

I met Jamala on one of my frequent trips to Domnik, when he gave me a copy of his first Dominican Creole dictionary. He was typical of denizens of the extraordinary village of Grand Bay in the southeast of the island, which like Belmont in Trinidad is a wellspring of creativity, a locus blessed by the ancestors. Born in 1955, Jamala started his education in Grand Bay but came by boat to England in 1965 joining the Dominican community which had settled in the Big Fug’s notoriously impoverished East End in Stratford and Forest Gate. Returning to Domnik he finished his secondary schooling at St Mary’s Academy, Roseau, where he became one of the young radicals, joining forces with another youngster Gregory Rabess, who along with Jamala was in the vanguard of championing Kweyol culture and language.

Leaving school Jamala started what must have been one of the first radio shows in Kweyol in the Anglophone Caribbean and with Gregory Rabess he was a leading light in the Committee for Kweyol Studies, a roots organisation which spearheaded the reclamation of Creole identity after the long years of colonialism. Besides his linguistic and lexicography skills, Jamala was like so many Grand Bay villagers a born musician, playing in some of the seminal bands which helped establish the unique Dominican genre of kadans or cadence-lypso, a fusion of Haitian konpas and Trini calypso.

When I came to the Big Fug I thought I’d lost touch with Jamala but taking a fortuitous walk through Canary Wharf last summer, I found my footsteps guided to West India Quay, where I immediately recognised the face of a striking Ras, seated in a wheelchair outside one of the fashionistas bars.

The joy of our reunion was tinged with the sadness of his news that he’d been diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease the previous autumn, another of life’s cruel blows as the healthy Jamala who stood over six feet tall was Dominican both in his abundant energy and stamina and was obviously fazed by the abrupt clipping of his wings.

He did however maintain his enthusiasm for life, refusing defeat and proudly informing me he’d completed a definitive dictionary of Dominican Kweyol, which he soon presented me with a copy of. We saw each other occasionally throughout the Autumn and we were both happy when I introduced him to the Horniman Museum in south east London, who were thrilled to have a Kweyol expert sit on their panel at last October’s Caribbean Question Time. It was suggested that he might be a valuable asset to the recently inaugurated Caribbean Literature and Creole Poetics MA course at Goldsmiths College, London University, but sadly that was not to be.

When I returned to the Big Fug from Trinidad mid way through last month I was doubly devastated—my father had died during my absence and then I got a call saying Jamala was in the Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green. He’d contracted a chest infection over Christmas and they’d nearly lost him, at one point his heart had stopped. As soon after my father’s funeral as I could, I visited Jamala in hospital, where he seemed to be making a miraculous recovery. He sat up in his bed, flashing his irresistible smile, surrounded by Dominican matrons chatting furiously in Kweyol. He spoke optimistically of the apartment he and his wife Joan were soon to move into. I left him promising him I’d see him in his new home, as having macoed his hospital notes I saw he was due to be discharged the following week.

He never made it out of the hospital, a sudden relapse took him away ten days later, which is how I found myself in the packed St Francis of Assisi RC church in Forest Gate yesterday.

The man was so loved that not only was the church packed but people waited patiently throughout the hour-long requiem mass on the pavement outside, in the steady February freezing drizzle. As the crowd filed past his coffin to make their final farewells, Nostalgia steelband, who he’d played with, played him out in style, a true pan Caribbean group, two Guyanese, a Trini from Sando and a couple of Dominicans.

The rain, no stranger to any Dominican, continued throughout the burial, accompanied by the fervent hymn singing of Dominican matrons and we left Jamala’s grave covered in flowers and flags of his beloved Domnik, repairing to a community centre in Forest Gate for a reception which turned into the kind of bram Jamala would have loved. Tables groaned under the weight of tantalising Creole cuisine and the bar flowed like a hundred Dominican rivers, while Nostalgia played uptempo versions of Abide With Me, Amazing Grace and plenty sankeys, before two bands unleashed kadans and konpas and the generations of Nicans and Lucians joined to send Jamala on his way.