Linda Kee remembers when her older brother Marvin decided he was going to dedicate his life to music. It was in the 1980s, and Marvin (The Fly) Kee and his three younger sisters were living in Calgary with their mother. He had other options when it came to deciding on a life path. As a teenager, he received good grades in school and was a star athlete who excelled in tennis, baseball and basketball, Linda says. But when attending Branton Junior High School, he met musicians who would later become his bandmates in the punk-funk band The High Rollers. By his late teens, they were performing regularly. Marvin never looked back.
“He would say, ‘I’m going to wear all black, and I’m just going to play music and express myself,’ ” says Linda. “So he did the switch. He made a major switch. There was no question. He was committed.”
A Pillar of the Calgary Music Scene
Marvin remained an integral part of the Calgary music scene for decades, performing until he died in 2023. In 2024, a mural created by Calgary artist Alex Kwong was unveiled in Inglewood that depicts Marvin and a number of the venues he played at along the “Music Mile.” The unveiling was followed by a New Orleans-style funeral march down 9th Avenue S.E. It coincided with Flyfest: A Musical Tribute to Marvin (The Fly) Kee, which brought together a long list of collaborators he had worked with over the years for a musical celebration. It was an outpouring of love for a musician who was dedicated to boosting Calgary’s musicians and music scene.
Weapon of Mass Creation: The Final Album
On June 21, Calgary’s Mo Gravy Records will release Weapon of Mass Creation by Flytrap, the name Marvin used when recording his own tracks. In the years before his death, he recorded tracks in seven different studios for the project, but did not get to finish it. Spearheaded by Linda Kee and produced by Evgeniy Bykovets, Marvin’s bandmate in Sargeant X Comrade and a co-founder of Mo Gravy Records, the album took three years to complete. Twenty musicians, including multi-instrumentalist Ravi Poliah, saxophonist Scott Morin, bassist Lisa Jacobs, percussionists Orlando Retana and Luis Tovar, and five vocalists dubbed the “Fly Girls,” helped Bykovets put the finishing touches on Weapon of Mass Creation. It’s a dynamic and assured mix of funk, neo-soul, R&B, acid jazz, punk and hip-hop centred around Marvin’s inventive guitar and bass playing.
A Collaborative Effort
Bykovets was just starting his music career when he met Marvin, who would eventually join Sargeant X Comrade as the act’s bass player after organizing a few shows for the duo. “He played a big role in the music scene,” says Bykovets. “He was the glue holding a lot of things together, a lot of the community in the music scene, but also outside of music. There were a lot of people who relied on Marvin. He was the type of dude who would expose you to all the cool stuff. He would be showing you the cool new things. A lot of people were friends with him on that level … They weren’t musicians, but they knew Marvin because he was the cool dude who would expose them to new music and cinema and all that sort of stuff.”
On the chill and slinky “Lovebomb Sexmachine,” soul singer Amy Lee Owens sings lyrics that Marvin penned. On other tracks, the lyrics were written by the contributing vocalists, including Chenelle Roberts, Ainsley Christine, Yolanda Sargeant of Sargeant X Comrade, and Sammy Jean, who was the original singer of Flytrap. New York rapper Kool Keith appears on the funk, hip-hop hybrid, “Increase the Peace.” On the spoken-word interlude “Diggin’ in the Crates,” we hear Marvin himself talking about his early days with the High Rollers and his teenage discoveries of Earth, Wind and Fire, Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone on old vinyl. “It changed my life. We were about 15, 16, and we were digging in the crates, in the vaults, and we found a whole universe,” he says.
