Sixties Styles of Jamaican Popular Music

Ska

Ska is a high-speed, horn heavy music with a lurching beat: two and four rather than one and three. Or maybe splitting each beat into two and hitting the second half like a semi crunching a Hyundai. I'm not sure that any previous style of American or European pop hit the beat as hard: the sucker is like hammering nails, and was the soundtrack for a rather odd, twitchy dance. Jamaican music before ska arrived around 1960 was a rough version of r&b, detectible from AM stations out of New Orleans and Miami. R&b is certainly an influence on ska itself as well, particularly in the vocal styles and the basic role of horns. But there is also something Caribbean and possibly Cuban in the basic ideas. Also, there is a serious influence of American movie soundtracks (Skatalites: from russia with love), and big band jazz with here and there a touch of bop. It's the beat that does it, however, and it's a fundamentally new style when it arrives.

Well before the arrival of ska, sound systems such as those Tom the Great Sebastian and Nick the Champ trucked speaker systems around Kingston and played outdoor parties with deejays spinning records. Sounds still ply their trade on the island. The early ska records were produced by Duke Reid, Clement (Coxsone) Dodd, and Prince Buster, all of whom ran large Kingston sounds. They were dominant producers for a long time afterward as well, and Buster was a major ska recording artist (one step beyond). Derrick Morgan's records with Buster were the first to really take off, but it was Dodd's house band the Skatalites - including Roland Alphonso (tenor sax), Tommy McCook (likewise), Don Drummond (trombone), and Jackie Mittoo (organ) - who have been immortalized as the paradigm of the sound. They recorded instrumentals under their own name as well as underneath many vocalists, including Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson, and Bob Marley and the Wailers (simmer down).

Prince Buster was a serious eccentric. He made great records, often using mouth-clicks for rhythm tracks. And even though his ska has a very consistent sound, it is also unpredictable. He might be the first of the truly bizarre coterie of Jamaican producers, at the head of which you'd have to place Lee Perry. Also Buster consistently worked in rasta themes.

One of the best ska acts was certainly Toots and the Maytals, featuring the churchy shouting of Toots Hibbert, one of the great and lasting artists of Jamaican music. Lee Perry produced "6 and 7 Books of Moses," for example, which drew on both Jamaican and American gospel traditions. Leslie Kong's Beverley's label recorded Jimmy Cliff and John Holt, among others.

The Skatalites considered themselves Rastafarians, and already rasta themes were finding there way into Jamaican music (consider the Skatalites' Addis Ababa), even as Count Ossie started performing nyahbingi drums and even contributing them to records. Ska seems like good-time party/dance music, but a surprising amount of it has religious themes or implications, as well as a bit of political oomph.

At the end of 1966, ska did an amazingly quick fade-out from Jamaican pop. But it has remained a resource for later performers all over the world, undergoing at least two major revivals. The first was the British "two-tone" bands that emerged from the punk movement, and often had both (London-)Jamaican and (white-)British members: The Specials (too much, too young), the English Beat, and Madness were the best known. The third wave of ska was largely American, early to mid-nineties: Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Aquabats (ska boss), and the rather insane Voodoo Glow Skulls, for example. The Voodoo Glow Skulls (land of misfit toys) make furious ska in which the horns sound like angry bees, and they often record their records in Spanish as well as English and pull something slightly Latin out of it. The best - realest and strongest - punk ska in my opinion, was made by Operation Ivy.

One other phenomenon we might mention: the "polska" of the amazing Texas band Brave Combo, who discovered that ska and polka were essentially the same thing, throwing in some crazed klezmer for good luck. Another interesting hybrid: The New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble.

Rock Steady

Styles of music seem to flow pretty quickly in Jamaica. Ska slowed down and took on younger, hipper themes in 1965-66, with a number of "rudie" records, about the adventures of young gangsters and delinquents in the Kingston ghettoes (immortalized by Jimmy Cliff in "The Harder they Come"). Maybe people just got too hot to dance that fast, but the music calmed down, at the same time getting more evil and cool. One person with a pretty good claim to be the inventor of rock steady is Lynn Taitt, a guitarist active in the ska era who started to make much cooler, sloer records in 1966 and played on many of the great rock steady records.

There is a similar syncopated or inside-out beat to ska, at half or quarter speed. The horns are moved back, the guitar moves forward, and there is much more emphasis on the vocals, which are essentially informed by American soul, particularly Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke. Lyric themes were basically rudie stuff and love, though there were occasional novelties as well. It's also fair to say that rasta themes grow ever more explicit during the period, and "conscious" music begins actually to be a fad. "Israelites," the great Desmond Dekker tune, is an example, and Ras Michael actually recorded some reggae ceremonial music. Bob Marley was in Delaware working in a car factory early in the rock steady period, and Peter Tosh recorded as a solo act a number of songs in a black power/rasta mode, including black man arise. Desmond Dekker's songs have a good claim to being the best rock steady records, and certainly were the most successful outside Jamaica (007 and the amazing Fu Manchu, for instance).

The drum and bass is where the song lives or what makes a record rock steady, and this is more or less true of all Jamaican music ever since: often the bass carries the main melodic theme, and it is often pretty simple, repetitive, hypnotic. That itself may be a rasta or ganja connection, though you don't have to be seriously into either to appreciate its mellowing and meditative effect.

I think if you don't know that much about Jamaican music you'd just think that rock steady was reggae, and indeed in some ways the distinction is pretty slippery, especially since so many reggae records either were built on pre-existing rock steady rhythm tracks, or imitated the great rock steady songs. This has been true in post-reggae Jamaican music as well, which often features chatters over rock steady beats. Reggae maybe is a bit less steady than rs, pulling harder at the syncopation, and the really dread moments are even slower and stoneder.

Artists who should be mentioned, for sure: Ken Boothe, Bob Andy (and Marcia Griffiths, with whom he often recorded a la Marvin and Tammy), the Paragons (featuring John Holt a love i can feel), Alton Ellis, the Melodians, Toots and the Maytals (whose style was perfect for this move, though a trifle uptempo), the Heptones, Dawn Penn (no, no, no). Producers (setting the basic structure for reggae): Bunny Lee, Lee Perry, Sylvia Pottinger, Joe Gibbs, and of course Duke and Dodd.

The Trojan Box sets are great bargains. Not necessarily definitive, but amazing amounts of good music. "Mojo Rock Steady" is as good a single-disc rock steady anthology as you could want. Again, not definitive, but great pioneering dj cuts by Prince Francis and King Stitt, the Gaylads classic and prescient "Africa, " etc. "Treasure Isle Showtime" is straight-up incredible Duke Reid rocksteady. The Paragons. Alton Ellis. The Melodians. Hopeton Lewis. Interesting presence of djs throughout, often toasting up to the vocal; great dj cuts of the same rhythms by U-Roy and Alcapone. The Dawn Penn was issued in the early nineties, and is a beautiful updating of her classic sound.