Jimmy Cliff Celebration of Life: Daughter Odessa Chambers Remembers

In Kingston, Jamaica, this Dec. 17 belongs to the late Jimmy Cliff. The reggae legend’s official celebration of life, sponsored by the island nation’s government and open to the public, is set to fill the National Indoor Sports Centre with the soundtrack 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 Cliff “a true father and mentor” after he died Nov. 24 at age 81. 

Cliff 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’s death only mentioned two of the singer’s children — Lilty and her brother Aken, whom Cliff shared with his widow, Latifa Chambers. Cliff’s eldest daughter, 53-year-old Odessa Chambers, says she and the siblings she grew up with were disappointed to feel erased from their dad’s story. “We’re very proud of our father,” she tells Rolling Stone on a call from Kingston. “And we’re very proud of each other. We’re very proud of the love that we all share at the end of the day. And we’re going to honor his legacy because we are his legacy.”

It was Odessa who had to share the news of Cliff’s passing with much of the family. She woke up to it that Monday morning. “We were numb,” she says. One of her hardest calls was to her uncle, Victor Chambers, her father’s older brother, manager, and protector. “Victor Chambers was a rock for my father,” she says. “It hurt me to be the one that had to break the news to him.” She then contacted 16 of the siblings through a WhatsApp group they share. “Some of the ones that lived in Europe answered first and some who lived here answered,” she says. “It was just silence, silence.”

Cliff maintained healthy, close relationships with the children and their seven different mothers throughout his life, Odessa says. “He made sure that all of us knew each other,” she adds. “For the rest of my siblings, the other mothers are like our other mothers as well. There’s no animosity.” 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. “One of the ways that they fell in love was their love of the continent and our people,” she says. In turn, Cliff took many of his kids around the world with him and ensured they bonded. “You’d never see my father without his children, especially in Jamaica,” she says. “I just want the world to know that my dad was a family man. His family and his children were everything to him.”

Most often, the siblings converged at their father’s Kingston home — or “Baba’s,” “Papa’s,” or “Skip’s” house, depending on which of them you ask — 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. “When I used to have birthday parties, I didn’t need any friends because I had all my brothers and sisters,” 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’d go to beaches, mineral baths, plays, circuses, and concerts with him too, like Sting, a huge show in Kingston on Boxing Day. “We’d all go to Sting to see who is going to clash, if it’s Ninjaman, or Shabba [Ranks], whoever the greats and the giants of that time were. Then we’ll come back home in the wee hours of the morning, like 9 a.m., we’ll have breakfast, talk about the clash afterwards, then go to sleep and just crash out.” With Cliff always wanting to stay hip, Odessa took him to a Public Enemy show at the Brixton Academy in the rap group’s prime. “I 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,” she remembers, laughing.

When 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. “There’s nobody better than my dad live,” she says, definitively.  “No reggae artist would top him. It’s very difficult to perform after Jimmy Cliff.” 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. “I got my training from my dad just going to do interviews with him, watching his approach — what to say, and what not to say,” she says. “The siblings and I, we just all hung out together and just watched in awe of our father.” She remembers a particular show in Maui, where heavy rains muddied the concert ground. “These people were still in the mud and the rain waiting for my dad to perform, and they were not moving,” says Odessa. “It was really bad, but they never left, and my dad performed for them. That’s when I really noticed how much people around the world loved him.”

Odessa says her first job was working in A&R and production with Chris Blackwell at Cliff’s 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’t facilitating her career for her. In fact, he had his reservations about her involvement. “He always said the entertainment industry is very seedy,” she says. “He would always guide me up to be careful and be aware of opportunists.” Odessa says she rarely mentioned her famous roots since she and her siblings valued their privacy. “I think Wyclef outed me on TV,” Odessa says playfully. She had met the Fugees’ Wyclef Jean as the band was working on their classic The Score. “He’s a huge fan of my father. I actually introduced Wyclef to my dad. Wyclef was doing an interview and said, ‘Yeah, Odessa, Jimmy Cliff’s daughter.’ Some people were like, ‘What?’ Everybody knew who I was from that time.”

An avid fan of Odessa’s podcast, Reasonings With Odessa, Cliff especially enjoyed her interviews with the 2000s dancehall sensation Sean Paul and the younger singer Sevana, who broke through in 2020 with “Mango,” a song the late singer loved. “He said to me, ‘You always set out to do what you wanted to do and never changed,” Odessa recalls. In her last conversation with her father before he died, his health “wasn’t 10,”  she says, but his voice and spirit were strong. Over two and a half hours, they talked “about spirituality, love, if I’m going to have children,” she says. “I was like, really? And then, if we believe in aliens, the birds – I have a bird bath outside of my apartment – and how I’ve become so in touch with nature.” They rarely talked about either of their work. “For me it was never about that,” she says. “It was just: Let me have a chit-chat with my dad, because it’s just my dad.”

Jimmy 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. “All of us have some form of creativity somewhere,” says Odessa. “We all sing along with our dad.”