{"id":189824,"date":"2025-12-17T18:40:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/189824\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T18:40:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:40:11","slug":"jimmy-cliff-celebration-of-life-daughter-odessa-chambers-remembers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/189824\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Cliff Celebration of Life: Daughter Odessa Chambers Remembers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn Kingston, Jamaica<\/a>, this Dec. 17 belongs to the late Jimmy Cliff<\/a>. The reggae<\/a> legend\u2019s official<\/a> celebration of life, sponsored by the island nation\u2019s government and open to the public (as well as being livestreamed<\/a>), is set to fill the National Indoor Sports Centre with the soundtrack<\/a> of his career. It was an endlessly consequential one: Cliff is, in many ways, a patriarch of Jamaican music, having introduced the wider world to reggae by shaping and starring in the 1973 musical-thriller The Harder They Come, as well as helping usher Bob Marley into the music business and much more. Dancehall star Buju Banton spoke for many when he called<\/a> Cliff \u201ca true father and mentor\u201d after he died<\/a> Nov. 24 at age 81.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCliff was a biological father to 19 children, too. One of his youngest, Lilty Cliff, is set to perform at his celebration of life, along with reggae and dancehall luminaries like Beenie Man and Nadine Sutherland. Many of the reports on and after Cliff\u2019s death only mentioned two of the singer\u2019s children \u2014\u00a0Lilty and her brother Aken, whom Cliff shared with his widow, Latifa Chambers. Cliff\u2019s eldest daughter, 53-year-old Odessa Chambers, wants to make sure the world knows about his whole family. \u201cWe\u2019re very proud of our father,\u201d she tells Rolling Stone on a call from Kingston. \u201cAnd we\u2019re very proud of each other. We\u2019re very proud of the love that we all share at the end of the day. And we\u2019re going to honor his legacy because we are his legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was Odessa who had to share the news of Cliff\u2019s passing with much of the family. She woke up to it that Monday morning. \u201cWe were numb,\u201d she says. One of her hardest calls was to her uncle, Victor Chambers, her father\u2019s older brother, manager, and protector. \u201cVictor Chambers was a rock for my father,\u201d she says. \u201cIt hurt me to be the one that had to break the news to him.\u201d She then contacted 16 of the siblings through a WhatsApp group they share. \u201cSome of the ones that lived in Europe answered first and some who lived here answered,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was just silence, silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tJimmy Cliff<\/a> (top right) poses with his brother Victor Chambers, who holds Cliff\u2019s niece Cherise. Below are his daughters Odessa and Naima, his nephew Sean, and sons Aaron, Norman, and Sayeed.<\/p>\n

\n\tCliff maintained healthy, close relationships with the children and their seven different mothers throughout his life, Odessa says. \u201cHe made sure that all of us knew each other,\u201d she adds. \u201cFor the rest of my siblings, the other mothers are like our other mothers as well. There\u2019s no animosity.\u201d Odessa was born in South London to filmmaker Bluette Abrahams, an early member of the Nation of Islam and a Black Liberation Front affiliate. Abrahams and Cliff were Pan-Africanists, an ethos Odessa has adopted. \u201cOne of the ways that they fell in love was their love of the continent and our people,\u201d she says. In turn, Cliff took many of his kids around the world with him and ensured they bonded. \u201cYou\u2019d never see my father without his children, especially in Jamaica,\u201d she says. \u201cI just want the world to know that my dad was a family man. His family and his children were everything to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMost often, the siblings converged at their father\u2019s Kingston home \u2014 or \u201cBaba\u2019s,\u201d \u201cPapa\u2019s,\u201d or \u201cSkip\u2019s\u201d house, depending on which of them you ask\u00a0\u2014 and it was full of life. Though she lived in London until she was 21, Odessa spent her summer, Easter, and Christmas breaks in Jamaica. \u201cWhen I used to have birthday parties, I didn\u2019t need any friends because I had all my brothers and sisters,\u201d she says. She remembers bouncing between their home, the nearby movie theater for kung fu flicks, and the arcade with her older brothers, their dad carting them around. They\u2019d go to beaches, mineral baths, plays, circuses, and concerts with him too, like Sting, a huge show in Kingston on Boxing Day. \u201cWe\u2019d all go to Sting to see who is going to clash, if it\u2019s Ninjaman, or Shabba [Ranks], whoever the greats and the giants of that time were. Then we\u2019ll come back home in the wee hours of the morning, like 9 a.m., we\u2019ll have breakfast, talk about the clash afterwards, then go to sleep and just crash out.\u201d With Cliff always wanting to stay hip, Odessa took him to a Public Enemy show at the Brixton Academy in the rap group\u2019s prime. \u201cI was looking for my dad, he was up in the balcony with me, and the next minute he was down on the ground in the pit with the brothers jumping,\u201d she remembers, laughing.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tJimmy Cliff and his daughter Odessa Chambers in New York during the 1970s.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Odessa Chambers<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Odessa was about 16, she joined her father on a tour of the American west coast and the Pacific islands over her summer break from school. \u201cThere\u2019s nobody better than my dad live,\u201d she says, definitively.\u00a0 \u201cNo reggae artist would top him. It\u2019s very difficult to perform after Jimmy Cliff.\u201d Odessa credits her career across journalism, public relations, and marketing to that teenage trek. Cliff tasked her with warming up the crowds, singing background vocals from backstage, and assisting his PR person. \u201cI got my training from my dad just going to do interviews with him, watching his approach \u2014 what to say, and what not to say,\u201d she says. \u201cThe siblings and I, we just all hung out together and just watched in awe of our father.\u201d She remembers a particular show in Maui, where heavy rains muddied the concert ground. \u201cThese people were still in the mud and the rain waiting for my dad to perform, and they were not moving,\u201d says Odessa. \u201cIt was really bad, but they never left, and my dad performed for them. That\u2019s when I really noticed how much people around the world loved him.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tJimmy Cliff and his sons Hasan, Amir, and Omar.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Odessa Chambers<\/p>\n

\n\tOdessa says her first job was working in A&R and production with Chris Blackwell at Cliff\u2019s former label, Island Records. She later worked in local television, producing her own music magazine show filled with stars like Shaggy, Bounty Killer, and Vybz Kartel, as well as reporting for another show. Still, she insists her dad wasn\u2019t facilitating her career for her. In fact, he had his reservations about her involvement. \u201cHe always said the entertainment industry is very seedy,\u201d she says. \u201cHe would always guide me up to be careful and be aware of opportunists.\u201d Odessa says she rarely mentioned her famous roots since she and her siblings valued their privacy. \u201cI think Wyclef outed me on TV,\u201d Odessa says playfully. She had met the Fugees\u2019 Wyclef Jean as the band was working on their classic The Score. \u201cHe\u2019s a huge fan of my father. I actually introduced Wyclef to my dad. Wyclef was doing an interview and said, \u2018Yeah, Odessa, Jimmy Cliff\u2019s daughter.\u2019 Some people were like, \u2018What?\u2019 Everybody knew who I was from that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tAn avid fan of Odessa\u2019s podcast, Reasonings With Odessa<\/a>, Cliff especially enjoyed her interviews with the 2000s dancehall sensation Sean Paul and the younger singer Sevana, who broke through in 2020 with \u201cMango,\u201d a song the late singer loved. \u201cHe said to me, \u2018You always set out to do what you wanted to do and never changed,\u201d Odessa recalls. In her last conversation with her father before he died, his health \u201cwasn\u2019t 100,\u201d\u00a0 she says, but his voice and spirit were strong. Over two and a half hours, they talked \u201cabout spirituality, love, if I\u2019m going to have children,\u201d she says. \u201cI was like, really? And then, if we believe in aliens, the birds \u2013 I have a bird bath outside of my apartment \u2013 and how I\u2019ve become so in touch with nature.\u201d They rarely talked about either of their work. \u201cFor me it was never about that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was just: Let me have a chit-chat with my dad, because it\u2019s just my dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJimmy Cliff was endlessly proud of all his children, she says. Her sister Nabiyah Be has most closely followed his career path as a singer and actor in hits like the play Hadestown, the film Black Panther, and the series Daisy Jones & the Six. A pair of twin sisters, Azza and Azama, are dancers in Berlin. Another sister, Kadijah, worked with HGTV before settling into motherhood. Her brother Norman is a multimedia technician at Edna Manley College in Kingston. He and another brother, Luqman, were always good rappers, and are currently looking to work on a project together, with Norman helming production. A sister, Naima, is an endoscopy nurse; a brother, Omar is in IT. \u201cAll of us have some form of creativity somewhere,\u201d says Odessa. \u201cWe all sing along with our dad.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Kingston, Jamaica, this Dec. 17 belongs to the late Jimmy Cliff. The reggae legend\u2019s official celebration of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46,64562,109091,55852],"class_list":{"0":"post-189824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-jamaica","13":"tag-jimmy-cliff","14":"tag-reggae"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}