Podcasts about Count Ossie

Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari – Bongo Man Nicky Athmani & Hodi Boys Band – Mapenzi Tu Cuban Marimba Band – Wanawake Wa Tanzania Getatchew Kassa - Tezeta Dorothy Masuka – Unamanga Esso Trinidad Steel Band – I Want You Back Alton Ellis – Something You Got Victor Uwaifo - Happy Day From Me To You

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/arts/music/prince-buster-trailblazer-of-ska-dies-at-78.htmlCecil Bustamente Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24, 1938. He performed with teenage groups in Kingston; he also became a boxer, taking the name Prince Buster.In the 1950s he began working for one of Jamaica's top producers and sound-system disc jockeys, Coxsone Dodd. By the end of the decade he had opened a record store, Buster's Record Shack, and was playing street parties with his own sound system, the Voice of the People. He decided to start producing songs as well as spinning them.Jamaicans were listening to, and imitating, the American R&B that reached the island on radio stations from New Orleans and Miami. Prince Buster's productions were more deliberately Jamaican. His production of the Folkes Brothers' “Oh Carolina,” recorded in 1959, meshed the traditional Nyabinghi drumming of a Rastafarian musician, Count Ossie, with what would come to be known as a ska beat.That beat, in songs like Eric Morris's “Humpty Dumpty,” made for huge hits in Jamaica and also had an impact in 1960s Britain. Prince Buster's instrumental “Al Capone” was a Top 20 hit there in 1965.By the end of the 1960s ska had given way to the slower rocksteady beat, a closer precursor of reggae. Prince Buster adapted, notably with his series of singles using his Judge Dread character. But in the early 1970s he gave up producing music and concentrated on business ventures, including record stores and a jukebox company, and moved to Miami.

Au programme de ce nouveau numéro, j'ai dépoussiéré mon disque dur et j'ai remis la main sur une des toutes premières perquisitions discales que j'ai menée, c'était en 2014, période où je n'avais presque aucun réseau, une audience inexistante, un micro Zoom que je ne maitrisais pas encore et où il m'étais donc difficile de m'imposer chez les particuliers en disant je veux venir chez vous fouiller dans vos bacs et vous interviewer. Mais par l'intermédiaire de Marvin Basileu, fanatique de la musique de Bob Marley et animateur dans une radio locale de Montpellier que je connaissais, j'ai pu faire la rencontre de Roots Arna.  Ce dernier est, depuis plusieurs années, un activiste de la scène reggae française.  Après être passé adolescent par le hip-hop, il a commencé à collectionner les vinyles de reggae dans les années 1990 et a construit son premier sound system Roots Spirit à Paris en 1995 avant de poser ses valises à Montpellier où il fonda en 2009 le sound system Salomon Héritage, qui est également un label ayant sorti une série de vinyles 12 pouces de qualité mettant en vedette des artistes talentueux s'exportant dans le monde entier.  

In this episode, James is playing tracks from vinyl available in Stephen's record shop. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/46-30/support

This episode is dedicated to uplifting the works of our ancestors, the love and light they have instilled within us and giving thanks for their legacy. Our gratitude should be show through our own trod in realizing our own mission and in doing so empowering the next generation.In this episode we combine the poetic and musical works of insightful brothers and sisters featuring there powerful works of wisdom and light. Thank you to each and everyone.Please find all frequencies featured below;Bob Marley - Lion of JudahFlowers by Randell AdjeiYoutube Channel : Holt RenfrewMidnite - ListenSukina Pilgrim - Oceans and AncestorsYoutube Channel : Sukina PilgrimDezarie - African Heart Lion Heart Sunni Patterson - SolutionaryYoutube Channel : TrippleCroxxEntCount Ossie - I Am A WarriorThea Monyee - The Language of Our AncestorsYoutube Channel : TEDxTalksJah 9 - In the SpiritDavid Diop - Africa My AfricaYoutube Channel : Eshereshe AfricaDamian Marley - Speak LifeBob Marley - Cornerstone Please subscribe if you feel the vibe and connect with Danieal via www.danieal.co.ukDisclaimer : Reggae Uprising Podcast does not own any of the rights to any of the music. It is used only as a tool of education, upliftment and empowerment for and of people of the diaspora. 

Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari – Bongo Man Nicky Athmani & Hodi Boys Band – Mapenzi Tu Cuban Marimba Band – Wanawake Wa Tanzania Getatchew Kassa - Tezeta Dorothy Masuka – Unamanga Esso Trinidad Steel Band – I Want You Back Alton Ellis – Something You Got Victor Uwaifo - Happy Day From Me To You Chuck Jackson – Human Norma Fraser - The First Cut is The Deepest Os Mutantes – A Minha Menina Peter Belli & Les Rivals - Ulven Peter Pearls Before Swine – Playmate Bob Martin – Blind Marie Arthur Miles – Lonely Cowboy Bill Wilson – Ever Changin Minstrel Sister Dora Alexander – Times Done Changed Nina Simone – Take Me To The Water Millie Small & Jimmy Cliff – Hey Boy Hey Girl Os Duques – Chicas Glen Adams - Hey There Lonely Girl Ronnie Von - Meu Bem Bernadette Carroll – Party Girl Barbara Mason – Poor Girl In Trouble Earl-Jean – I'm Into Something Good The Techniques – I'll Be Right There Bunny 'Ruggs' Scott - To Love Somebody S.E. Rogie - She Caught Me Red Hot Chris Kenner – Go Through Life Honeybus – La Cigona The Bermudas – Chu Sen Ling The Mamas & The Papas – Snowqueen of Texas Relatively Clean Rivers – They Knew What To Say Gimmer Nicholson – Hermetic Waltz Bobby Darin – If I Were A Carpenter Heron – Upon Reflection Ramsey Lewis – Les Fleurs

Our final guest of 2021 shares her legacy of love, wisdom and inspiration.This weeks guest Count Ossies daughter; Countess Mojiba Ase who is a spoken word artist, numerologist, write and heal therapist, event planner, host, actress and make-up artist. Her works as an author include Peace Over Anger, Akette Fundeh Love Count Ossie & Mojiba, Yoniverse Journey, Epiphany Abuse Theory Memoirs of Moji and most recently Self Magic. As well as being the founder of S.E.L.F LOVE WORLD and J.R.A.W.IConnect with Mojibahttps://mojibaasethemogul.com/https://www.instagram.com/Selflove_cures/https://www.amazon.co.uk/self-magic-Mojiba-Romanetti/dp/B08BD9D27RConnect with Mojibahttps://mojibaasethemogul.com/https://www.instagram.com/Selflove_cures/https://www.amazon.co.uk/self-magic-Mojiba-Romanetti/dp/B08BD9D27RConnect with Mojibahttps://mojibaasethemogul.com/https://www.instagram.com/Selflove_cures/https://www.amazon.co.uk/self-magic-Mojiba-Romanetti/dp/B08BD9D27RPlease subscribe if you feel the vibe and connect with Danieal via www.danieal.co.ukDisclaimer : Reggae Uprising Podcast does not own any of the rights to any of the music. It is used only as a tool of education, upliftment and empowerment for and of people of the diaspora. 

New music from Tonstartssbandht and Cindy, tributes to Mensi aka Thomas Mensforth of the Angelic Upstarts and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees (including the Lemonheads covering "Different Drum"), as well as archival music from New Zealand post-punk band Shoes This High and reggae/dub/jazz from Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari.

Mysteries of the Deep Podcast, Chapter CXXXI by Blacklauren (@mrblacklauren)(Sponsored by the Long Count Cycle). Cover photo courtesy of Candace Price. Tracklist: 1. Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Four Hundred Years 2. Efdemin - Steinbeisser 3. Desroi - From Afar 4. Jorum - Bone Scan 5. Donato Dozzy - Mindless Fullness 6. King Britt - Celestial Edit 01 7. Last Life - VAR 1 8. A Sacred Geometry - Apse 9. Ulwhednar - PIR Motion Detector 10. Kuba Sojka - Hipnagogia 11. Dino Sabatini - Akanke 12. FOR. - Geofence HR 13. Bambounou - Send When You Land 14. Octavius - Beauty And Suffering 15. OVERSTEP - Mad As Hell 16. Marco Shuttle - Elephante 17. Artefakt - Terraforming 18. Aether Mechanics - Viral Disease 19. Pedestrian - Became 20. Sebastian Mullaert - In The Mist We Appeared 21. Sindh - Nun-Kun 22. Gathaspar - Wglebiduszy 23. Unknown Artist - Untitled 011 24. Manno Charlemagne - Lan Male m' Ye

This week's episode looks at "My Boy Lollipop" and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode -- a content warning applies for the song "Bloodshot Eyes" by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won't link to because of the paywall). Millie's early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to "Barbara Gaye" when I should say "Barbie Gaye" Transcript Today, we're going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we're looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We're going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We're going to look at "My Boy Lollipop" by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] Most of the music we've looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I'm afraid that that's going to remain largely the case -- while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock's detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we're going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations -- I'm trying to give as much information about Jamaica's musical culture in one episode as I've given about America's in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I'm missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn't even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems -- big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people -- in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a "rhumba box", and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle -- this form of mento is often still called "country music" in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, "Matilda"] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it's a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don't know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like "Hoola Hoop Calypso", and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music -- people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on -- and I honestly can't hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, "Strip Tease"] But I'll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there's a difference I'm not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first -- there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris -- the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes". I'm going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Bloodshot Eyes"] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair -- a musician we've not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz -- Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren't widely available in Jamaica -- indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The "sound man" was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records -- they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound -- usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had -- if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he'd scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious -- it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ -- one of the few in Jamaica -- presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith's "My Mother's Eyes", would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, "My Mother's Eyes"] Reid's Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd's system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn't perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well -- one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid's shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be -- he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid's edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties -- as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, "Later For Gator" by Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it "Coxsone Hop": [Excerpt: Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, "Later For Gator"] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested -- Reid wanted Dodd to know he'd been beaten.  Now, here I'm going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we're likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I'm mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent -- which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I'm choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: "So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him." There was a second problem with using American records, as well -- American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren't. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn't keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious -- they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds -- a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn't have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn't touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience -- if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was "Lollipop Girl", a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record -- and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd's assistants to get hold of Dodd's copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash -- a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over -- and Reid played his own copy of "Lollipop Girl", Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of "Lollipop Girl", he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing -- he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, "Lollipop Girl"] Reid didn't make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress "ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and". In mento, though, you'd often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be "one AND two AND three AND four AND". Seaga had the guitarist on "Manny Oh" by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, "Manny Oh"] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term "ska" came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying "play it ska... ska... ska..." Where "Manny Oh" had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, "Easy Snappin'" is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, "Easy Snappin'"] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single "Oh Carolina", incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, "Oh Carolina"] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska's first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on "Ko Ko Mo", but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa's studio, pairing Leonard Lee's baritone voice with Shirley Goodman's soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists -- for example Shirley and Lee's "Sweethearts": [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Sweethearts"] bears a very strong resemblance to "Double-Crossing Blues": [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, "Double-Crossing Blues"] But they'd soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like "Feel So Good" showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, "Feel So Good"] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille's voice sounded enough like Shirley's that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like "Sit and Cry", a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of "The Twist": [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, "Sit and Cry"] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and "We'll Meet" by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, "We'll Meet"] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country -- there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men -- Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn't performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming's mistress -- Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there -- according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming's death, his wife instructed the villa's manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He'd started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents' money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, "Boogie in My Bones", by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Boogie in My Bones"] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He'd been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time -- there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain "bluebeat" became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, "King of Kings", performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, "King of Kings"] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came "Mockingbird Hill", a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts' uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, "Mockingbird Hill"] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that "Mockingbird Hill" was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to "I Call Your Name": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Call Your Name"] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie's mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn't have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie's first British single, "Don't You Know", was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, "Don't You Know"] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye's biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she'd briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. "My Boy Lollipop" had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game -- and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, "My Boy Lollipop"] That hadn't been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording "Night of the Vampire": [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions' harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop"] "My Boy Lollipop" came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, "Sweet William", only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, "Sweet William"] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of "Bloodshot Eyes", without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, "Bloodshot Eyes"] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, "Hey Boy, Hey Girl"] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, "Pledging My Love"] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner's "I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song)": [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] But the Spencer Davis Group didn't revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track "Enoch Power", in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, "Enoch Power"] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of "My Boy Lollipop": [Excerpt: Bad Manners, "My Girl Lollipop"] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode — a content warning applies for the song “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris. The information about ska in general mostly comes from Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, with some also from Reggae and Caribbean Music by Dave Thompson. Biographical information on Millie Small is largely from this article in Record Collector, plus a paywalled interview with Goldmine magazine (which I won’t link to because of the paywall). Millie’s early recordings with Owen Gray and Coxsone Dodd can be found on this compilation, along with a good selection of other recordings Dodd produced, while this compilation gives a good overview of her recordings for Island and Fontana. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I refer to “Barbara Gaye” when I should say “Barbie Gaye” Transcript Today, we’re going to take our first look at a form of music that would go on to have an almost incalculable influence on the music of the seventies, eighties, and later, but which at the time we’re looking at was largely regarded as a novelty music, at least in Britain and America. We’re going to look at the birth of ska, and at the first ska record to break big outside of Jamaica. We’re going to look at “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] Most of the music we’ve looked at so far in the podcast has been from either America or Britain, and I’m afraid that that’s going to remain largely the case — while there has been great music made in every country in the world, American and British musicians have tended to be so parochial, and have dominated the music industry so much, that relatively little of that music has made itself felt widely enough to have any kind of impact on the wider history of rock music, much to rock’s detriment. But every so often something from outside the British Isles or North America manages to penetrate even the closed ears of Anglo-American musicians, and today we’re going to look at one of those records. Now, before we start this, this episode is, by necessity, going to be dealing in broad generalisations — I’m trying to give as much information about Jamaica’s musical culture in one episode as I’ve given about America’s in a hundred, so I am going to have to elide a lot of details. Some of those details will come up in future episodes, as we deal with more Jamaican artists, but be aware that I’m missing stuff out. The thing that needs to be understood about the Jamaican music culture of the fifties and early sixties is that it developed in conditions of absolute poverty. Much of the music we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast came from extremely impoverished communities, of course, but even given how utterly, soul-crushingly, poor many people in the Deep South were, or the miserable conditions that people in Liverpool and London lived in while Britain was rebuilding itself after the war, those people were living in rich countries, and so still had access to some things that were not available to the poor people of poorer countries. So in Jamaica in the 1950s, almost nobody had access to any kind of record player or radio themselves. You wouldn’t even *know* anyone who had one, unlike in the states where if you were very poor you might not have one yourself, but your better-off cousin might let you come round and listen to the radio  at their house. So music was, by necessity, a communal experience.  Jamaican music, or at least the music in Kingston, the biggest city in Jamaica, was organised around  sound systems — big public open-air systems run by DJs, playing records for dancing. These had originally started in shops as a way of getting customers in, but soon became so popular that people started doing them on their own. These sound systems played music that was very different from the music played on the radio, which was aimed mostly at people rich enough to own radios, which at that time mostly meant white British people — in the fifties, Jamaica was still part of the British Empire, and there was an extraordinary gap between the music the white British colonial class liked and the music that the rest of the population liked.  The music that the Jamaican population *made* was mostly a genre called mento. Now, this is somewhere where my ignorance of this music compared to other musics comes into play a bit. There seem to have been two genres referred to as mento. One of them, rural mento, was based around instruments like the banjo, and a home-made bass instrument called a “rhumba box”, and had a resemblance to a lot of American country music or British skiffle — this form of mento is often still called “country music” in Jamaica itself: [Excerpt: The Hiltonaires, “Matilda”] There was another variant of mento, urban mento, which dropped the acoustic and home-made instruments and replaced them with the same sort of instruments that R&B or jazz bands used. Everything I read about urban mento says that it’s a different genre from calypso music, which generally comes from Trinidad and Tobago rather than Jamaica, but nothing explains what that difference is, other than the location. Mento musicians would also call their music calypso in order to sell it to people like me who don’t know the difference, and so you would get mento groups called things like Count Lasher and His Calypsonians, Lord Lebby and the Jamaica Calypsonians, and Count Owen and His Calypsonians, songs called things like “Hoola Hoop Calypso”, and mentions of calypso in the lyrics. I am fairly familiar with calypso music — people like the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, and so on — and I honestly can’t hear any difference between calypso proper and mento records like this one, by Lord Power and Trenton Spence: [Excerpt: Lord Power and Trenton Spence, “Strip Tease”] But I’ll defer to the experts in these genres and accept that there’s a difference I’m not hearing. Mento was primarily a music for live performance, at least at first — there were very few recording facilities in Jamaica, and to the extent that records were made at all there, they were mostly done in very small runs to sell to tourists, who wanted a souvenir to take home. The music that the first sound systems played would include some mento records, and they would also play a fair number of latin-flavoured records. But the bulk of what they played was music for dancing, imported from America, made by Black American musicians, many of them the same musicians we looked at in the early months of this podcast. Louis Jordan was a big favourite, as was Wynonie Harris — the biggest hit in the early years of the sound systems was Harris’ “Bloodshot Eyes”. I’m going to excerpt that here, because it was an important record in the evolution of Jamaican music, but be warned that the song trivialises intimate partner violence in a way that many people might find disturbing. If you might be upset by that, skip forward exactly thirty seconds now: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Bloodshot Eyes”] The other artists who get repeatedly named in the histories of the early sound systems along with Jordan and Harris are Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair — a musician we’ve not talked about in the podcast, but who made New Orleans R&B music in the same style as Domino and Price, and for slow-dancing the Moonglows and Jesse Belvin. They would also play jazz — Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were particular favourites. These records weren’t widely available in Jamaica — indeed, *no* records were really widely available . They found their way into Jamaica through merchant seamen, who would often be tasked by sound men with getting hold of new and exciting records, and paid with rum or marijuana. The “sound man” was the term used for the DJs who ran these sound systems, and they were performers as much as they were people who played records — they would talk and get the crowds going, they would invent dance steps and perform them, and they would also use the few bits of technology they had to alter the sound — usually by adding bass or echo. Their reputation was built by finding the most obscure records, but ones which the crowds would love. Every sound man worth his salt had a collection of records that nobody else had — if you were playing the same records that someone else had, you were a loser. As soon as a sound man got hold of a record, he’d scratch out all the identifying copy on the label and replace it with a new title, so that none of his rivals could get hold of their own copies. The rivalry between sound men could be serious — it started out just as friendly competition, with each man trying to build a bigger and louder system and draw a bigger crowd, but when the former policeman turned gangster Duke Reid started up his Trojan sound system, intimidating rivals with guns soon became par for the course. Reid had actually started out in music as an R&B radio DJ — one of the few in Jamaica — presenting a show whose theme song, Tab Smith’s “My Mother’s Eyes”, would become permanently identified with Reid: [Excerpt: Tab Smith, “My Mother’s Eyes”] Reid’s Trojan was one of the two biggest sound systems in Kingston, the other being Downbeat, run by Coxsone Dodd. Dodd’s system became so popular that he ended up having five different sound systems, all playing in different areas of the city every night, with the ones he didn’t perform at himself being run by assistants who later became big names in the Jamaican music world themselves, like Prince Buster and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Buster performed a few other functions for Dodd as well — one important one being that he  knew enough about R&B that he could go to Duke Reid’s shows, listen to the records he was playing, and figure out what they must be — he could recognise the different production styles of the different R&B labels well enough that he could use that, plus the lyrics, to work out the probable title and label of a record Reid was playing. Dodd would then get a merchant seaman to bring a copy of that record back from America, get a local record pressing plant to press up a bunch of copies of it, and sell it to the other sound men, thus destroying Reid’s edge. Eventually Prince Buster left Dodd and set up his own rival sound system, at which point the rivalry became a three-way one. Dodd knew about technology, and had the most powerful sound system with the best amps. Prince Buster was the best showman, who knew what the people wanted and gave it to them, and Duke Reid was connected and powerful enough that he could use intimidation to keep a grip on power, but he also had good enough musical instincts that his shows were genuinely popular in their own right. People started to see their favourite sound systems in the same way they see sports teams or political parties — as marks of identity that were worth getting into serious fights over. Supporters of one system would regularly attack supporters of another, and who your favourite sound system was *really mattered*. But there was a problem. While these systems were playing a handful of mento records, they were mostly relying on American records, and this had two problems. The most obvious was that if a record was available publicly, eventually someone else would find it. Coxsone Dodd managed to use one record, “Later For Gator” by Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, at every show for seven years, renaming it “Coxsone Hop”: [Excerpt: Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, “Later For Gator”] But eventually word got out that Duke Reid had tracked the song down and would play it at a dance. Dodd went along, and was allowed in unmolested — Reid wanted Dodd to know he’d been beaten.  Now, here I’m going to quote something Prince Buster said, and we hit a problem we’re likely to hit again when it comes to Jamaica. Buster spoke Jamaican Patois, a creole language that is mutually intelligible with, but different from, standard English. When quoting him, or any other Patois speaker, I have a choice of three different options, all bad. I could translate his words into standard English, thus misrepresenting him; I could read his words directly in my own accent, which has the problem that it can sound patronising, or like I’m mocking his language, because so much of Patois is to do with the way the words are pronounced; or I could attempt to approximate his own accent — which would probably come off as incredibly racist. As the least bad option of the three, I’m choosing the middle one here, and reading in my own accent, but I want people to be aware that this is not intended as mockery, and that I have at least given this some thought: “So we wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear “Baaap… bap da dap da dap, daaaa da daap!” And we see a bunch of them down from the dancehall coming up with the green bush. I was at the counter with Coxsone, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar, then get Phantom to give me a hand. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him.” There was a second problem with using American records, as well — American musical tastes were starting to change, and Jamaican ones weren’t. Jamaican audiences wanted Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, and Gene & Eunice, but the Americans wanted Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. For a while, the sound men were able to just keep finding more and more obscure old R&B and jump band records, but there was a finite supply of these, and they couldn’t keep doing it forever. The solution eventually became obvious — they needed Jamaican R&B. And thankfully there was a ready supply. Every week, there was a big talent contest in Kingston, and the winners would get five pounds — a lot of money in that time and place. Many of the winners would then go to a disc-cutting service, one of those places that would record a single copy of a song for you, and use their prize money to record themselves. They could then sell that record to one of the sound men, who would be sure that nobody else would have a copy of it. At first, the only sound men they could sell to were the less successful ones, who didn’t have good connections with American records. A local record was clearly not as good as an American one, and so the big sound systems wouldn’t touch it, but it was better than nothing, and some of the small sound systems would find that the local records were a success for them, and eventually the bigger systems would start using the small ones as a test audience — if a local record went down well at a small system, one of the big operators would get in touch with the sound man of that system and buy the record from him. One of the big examples of this was “Lollipop Girl”, a song by Derrick Harriott and Claudie Sang. They recorded that, with just a piano backing, and sold their only copy to a small sound system owner. It went down so well that the small sound man traded his copy with Coxsone Dodd for an American record — and it went down so well when Dodd played it that Duke Reid bribed one of Dodd’s assistants to get hold of Dodd’s copy long enough to get a copy made for himself. When Dodd and Reid played a sound clash — a show where they went head to head to see who could win a crowd over — and Reid played his own copy of “Lollipop Girl”, Dodd pulled a gun on Reid, and it was only the fact that the clash was next door to the police station that kept the two men from killing each other. Reid eventually wore out his copy of “Lollipop Girl”, he played it so much, and so he did the only sensible thing — he went into the record business himself, and took Harriott into the studio, along with a bunch of musicians from the local big bands, and cut a new version of it with a full band backing Harriott. As well as playing this on his sound system, Reid released it as a record: [Excerpt: Derrick Harriott, “Lollipop Girl”] Reid didn’t make many more records at this point, but both Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster started up their own labels, and started hiring local singers, plus people from a small pool of players who became the go-to session musicians for any record made in Jamaica at the time, like trombone player Rico Rodriguez and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. During the late 1950s, a new form of music developed from these recordings, which would become known as ska, and there are three records which are generally considered to be milestones in its development. The first was produced by a white businessman, Edward Seaga, who is now more famous for becoming the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1980s. At the time, though, Seaga had the idea to incorporate a little bit of a mento rhythm into an R&B record he was producing. In most music, if you have a four-four rhythm, you can divide it into eight on-beats and off-beats, and you normally stress the on-beats, so you stress “ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and”. In mento, though, you’d often have a banjo stress the off-beats, so the stresses would be “one AND two AND three AND four AND”. Seaga had the guitarist on “Manny Oh” by Higgs and Wilson do this, on a track that was otherwise a straightforward New Orleans style R&B song with a tresillo bassline. The change in stresses is almost imperceptible to modern ears, but it made the record sound uniquely Jamaican to its audience: [Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, “Manny Oh”] The next record in the sequence was produced by Dodd, and is generally considered the first real ska record. There are a few different stories about where the term “ska” came from, but one of the more believable is that it came from Dodd directing Ernest Ranglin, who was the arranger for the record, to stress the off-beat more, saying “play it ska… ska… ska…” Where “Manny Oh” had been a Jamaican sounding R&B record, “Easy Snappin'” is definitely a blues-influenced ska record: [Excerpt: Theo Beckford, “Easy Snappin'”] But Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, at this point, still saw the music they were making as a substitute for American R&B. Prince Buster, on the other hand, by this point was a full-fledged Black nationalist, and wanted to make a purely Jamaican music. Buster was, in particular, an adherent of the Rastafari religion, and he brought in five drummers from the Rasta Nyabinghi tradition, most notably Count Ossie, who became the single most influential drummer in Jamaica, to record on the Folkes brothers single “Oh Carolina”, incorporating the rhythms of Rasta sacred music into Jamaican R&B for the first time: [Excerpt: The Folkes Brothers, “Oh Carolina”] 1962 was a turning point in Jamaican music in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it was the year that Jamaica became independent from the British Empire, and was able to take control of its own destiny. But it was also the year that saw the first recordings of a fourteen-year-old girl who would become ska’s first international star. Millie Small had started performing at the age of twelve, when she won the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, the single biggest talent contest in Kingston. But it was two years later that she came to the attention of Coxsone Dodd, who was very interested in her because her voice sounded spookily like that of Shirley, from the duo Shirley and Lee. We mentioned Shirley and Lee briefly back in the episode on “Ko Ko Mo”, but they were a New Orleans R&B duo who had a string of hits in the early and mid fifties, recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, pairing Leonard Lee’s baritone voice with Shirley Goodman’s soprano. Their early records had been knock-offs of the sound that Little Esther had created with Johnny Otis and his male vocalists — for example Shirley and Lee’s “Sweethearts”: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Sweethearts”] bears a very strong resemblance to “Double-Crossing Blues”: [Excerpt: Little Esther, Johnny Otis, and the Robins, “Double-Crossing Blues”] But they’d soon developed a more New Orleans style, with records like “Feel So Good” showing some of the Caribbean influence that many records from the area had: [Excerpt: Shirley and Lee, “Feel So Good”] Shirley and Lee only had minor chart success in the US, but spawned a host of imitators, including Gene and Eunice and Mickey and Sylvia, both of whom we looked at in the early months of the podcast, and Ike and Tina Turner who will be coming up later. Like much New Orleans R&B, Shirley and Lee were hugely popular among the sound system listeners, and Coxsone Dodd thought that Mille’s voice sounded enough like Shirley’s that it would be worth setting her up as part of his own Shirley and Lee soundalike duo, pairing her with a more established singer, Owen Gray, to record songs like “Sit and Cry”, a song which combined the vocal sound of Shirley and Lee with the melody of “The Twist”: [Excerpt: Owen and Millie, “Sit and Cry”] After Gray decided to continue performing on his own, Millie was instead teamed with another performer, Roy Panton, and “We’ll Meet” by Roy and Millie went to number one in Jamaica: [Excerpt: Roy and Millie, “We’ll Meet”] Meanwhile, in the UK, there was a growing interest in music from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Until very recently, Britain had been a very white country — there have always been Black people in the UK, especially in port towns, but there had been very few. As of 1950, there were only about twenty thousand people of colour living in the UK. But starting in 1948, there had been a massive wave of immigration from other parts of what was then still the British Empire, as the government encouraged people to come here to help rebuild the country after the war. By 1961 there were nearly two hundred thousand Black people in Britain, almost all of them from the Caribbean.  Those people obviously wanted to hear the music of their own culture, and one man in particular was giving it to them. Chris Blackwell was a remarkably privileged man. His father had been one of the heirs to the Crosse and Blackwell fortune, and young Chris had been educated at Harrow, but when not in school he had spent much of his youth in Jamaica. His mother, Blanche, lived in Jamaica, where she was a muse to many men — Noel Coward based a character on her, in a play he wrote in 1956 but which was considered so scandalous that it wasn’t performed in public until 2012. Blanche attended the premiere of that play, when she was ninety-nine years old. She had an affair with Errol Flynn, and was also Ian Fleming’s mistress — Fleming would go to his Jamaican villa, GoldenEye, every year to write, leaving his wife at home (where she was having her own affairs, with the Labour MPs Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins), and would hook up with Blanche while he was there — according to several sources, Fleming based the characters of Pussy Galore and Honeychile Ryder on Blanche. After Fleming’s death, his wife instructed the villa’s manager that it could be rented to literally anyone except Blanche Blackwell, but in the mid-1970s it was bought by Bob Marley, who in turn sold it to Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell had developed a fascination with Rasta culture after having crashed his boat while sailing, and being rescued by some Rasta fishermen, and he had decided that his goal was to promote Jamaican culture to the world. He’d started his own labels, Island Records, in 1959, using his parents’ money, and had soon produced a Jamaican number one, “Boogie in My Bones”, by Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Boogie in My Bones”] But music was still something of a hobby with Blackwell, to the point that he nearly quit it altogether in 1962. He’d been given a job as a gopher on the first James Bond film, Dr. No, thanks to his family connections, and had also had a cameo role in the film. Harry Saltzman, the producer, offered him a job, but Blackwell went to a fortune teller who told him to stick with music, and he did. Soon after that, he moved back to England, where he continued running Island Records, this time as a distributor of Jamaican records. The label would occasionally record some tracks of its own, but it made its money from releasing Jamaican records, which Blackwell would hand-sell to local record shops around immigrant communities in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Island was not the biggest of the labels releasing Jamaican music in Britain at the time — there was another label, Blue Beat, which got most of the big records, and which was so popular that in Britain “bluebeat” became a common term for ska, used to describe the whole genre, in the same way as Motown might be. And ska was becoming popular enough that there was also local ska being made, by Jamaican musicians living in Britain, and it was starting to chart. The first ska record to hit the charts in Britain was a cover of a Jimmy Cliff song, “King of Kings”, performed by Ezz Reco and the Launchers: [Excerpt: Ezz Reco and the Launchers, “King of Kings”] That made the lower reaches of the top forty, and soon after came “Mockingbird Hill”, a ska remake of an old Les Paul and Mary Ford hit, recorded by the Migil Five, a white British R&B group whose main claim to fame was that one of them was Charlie Watts’ uncle, and Watts had occasionally filled in on drums for them before joining the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: Migil Five, “Mockingbird Hill”] That made the top ten. Ska was becoming the in sound in Britain, to the point that in March 1964, the same month that “Mockingbird Hill” was released, the Beatles made a brief detour into ska in the instrumental break to “I Call Your Name”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Call Your Name”] And it was into this atmosphere that Chris Blackwell decided to introduce Millie. Her early records had been selling well enough for him that in 1963 he had decided to call Millie’s mother and promise her that if her daughter came over to the UK, he would be able to make her into a star. Rather than release her records on Island, which didn’t have any wide distribution, he decided to license them to Fontana, a mid-sized British label. Millie’s first British single, “Don’t You Know”, was released in late 1963, and was standard British pop music of the time, with little to distinguish it, and so unsurprisingly it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Millie, “Don’t You Know”] But the second single was something different. For that, Blackwell remembered a song that had been popular among the sound systems a few years earlier; an American record by a white singer named Barbara Gaye. Up to this point, Gaye’s biggest claim to fame had been that Ellie Greenwich had liked this record enough that she’d briefly performed under the stage name Ellie Gaye, before deciding against that. “My Boy Lollipop” had been written by Robert Spencer of the Cadillacs, the doo-wop group whose biggest hit had been “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Spencer had written “My Boy Lollipop”, but lost the rights to it in a card game — and then Morris Levy bought the rights from the winner for a hundred dollars. Levy changed the songwriting credit to feature a mob acquaintance of his, Johnny Roberts, and then passed the song to Gaetano Vastola, another mobster, who had it recorded by Gaye, a teenage girl he managed, with the backing provided by the normal New York R&B session players, like Big Al Sears and Panama Francis: [Excerpt: Barbie Gaye, “My Boy Lollipop”] That hadn’t been a hit when it was released in 1956, but it had later been picked up by the Jamaican sound men, partly because of its resemblance to the ska style, and Blackwell had a tape recording of it. Blackwell got Ernest Ranglin, who had also worked on Dr. No, and who had moved over to the UK at the same time as Blackwell, to come up with an arrangement, and Ranglin hired a local band to perform the instrumental backing. That band, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, had previously been known as the Moontrekkers, and had worked with Joe Meek, recording “Night of the Vampire”: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] Ranglin replaced the saxophone solo from the original record with a harmonica solo, to fit the current fad for the harmonica in the British charts, and there is some dispute about who played it, but Millie always insisted that it was the Five Dimensions’ harmonica player, Rod Stewart, though Stewart denies it: [Excerpt: Millie, “My Boy Lollipop”] “My Boy Lollipop” came out in early 1964 and became a massive hit, reaching number two on the charts both in the UK and the US, and Millie was now a star. She got her own UK TV special, as well as appearing on Around The Beatles, a special starring the Beatles and produced by Jack Good. She was romantically linked to Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon. Her next single, though, “Sweet William”, only made number thirty, as the brief first wave of interest in ska among the white public subsided: [Excerpt: Millie, “Sweet William”] Over the next few years, there were many attempts made to get her back in the charts, but the last thing that came near was a remake of “Bloodshot Eyes”, without the intimate partner violence references, which made number forty-eight on the UK charts at the end of 1965: [Excerpt: Millie, “Bloodshot Eyes”] She was also teamed with other artists in an attempt to replicate her success as a duet act. She recorded with Jimmy Cliff: [Excerpt: Millie and Jimmy Cliff, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”] and Jackie Edwards: [Excerpt: Jackie and Millie, “Pledging My Love”] and she was also teamed with a rock group Blackwell had discovered, and who would soon become big stars themselves with versions of songs by Edwards, on a cover version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “I’m Blue (the Gong Gong Song)”: [Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, “I’m Blue (The Gong Gong Song)”] But the Spencer Davis Group didn’t revive her fortunes, and she moved on to a succession of smaller labels, with her final recordings coming in the early 1970s, when she recorded the track “Enoch Power”, in response to the racism stirred up by the right-wing politician Enoch Powell: [Excerpt: Millie Small, “Enoch Power”] Millie spent much of the next few decades in poverty. There was talk of a comeback in the early eighties, after the British ska revival group Bad Manners had a top ten hit with a gender-flipped remake of “My Boy Lollipop”: [Excerpt: Bad Manners, “My Girl Lollipop”] But she never performed again after the early seventies, and other than one brief interview in 2016 she kept her life private. She was given multiple honours by the people of Jamaica, including being made a Commander in the Order of Distinction, but never really got any financial benefit from her enormous chart success, or from being the first Jamaican artist to make an impact on Britain and America. She died last year, aged seventy-two.

Wake up to reality with special guest Ijahknowah who delivers a message to heal, uplift, enlighten, and empower our people and thus the entire humanity. Wake Up, is the debut EP from Ijahnkowah An B.R.A.P (Black Revolutionary Almighty Perspective). Wake Up is available now. https://album.link/i/1536787110 IJAHKNOWAH AN B.R.A.P. is a Reggae artist and band doing only originals to inform uplift and elevate the masses of the real-life energies. IJAHKNOWAH was born in the Parish of St. Thomas in Jamaica, located in the Blue Mountain region. IJAH, as he is affectionally called, comes from a family with immense musical talent. His inherited passion for music caused him to listen attentively to his favorite artists such as Peter Tosh, Joseph Hill (Culture), Burning Spear, Count Ossie, Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, Nina Simone, Gill Scott Heron, and Fela Kuti. He was further influenced by his native music “Mento and Pocomania”. IJAH’s first public performance was at Jamaica’s Agricultural Society Benefit Concert where he performed his own rendition of “Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff. IJAHKNOWAH closely identifies himself with many of Marcus Garvey’s beliefs and teachings and has remained a true loyal Pan Africanist. IJAH has always aspired to become a Reggae recording artist with a special message. He began writing his lyrics between the late ’70s and early ’80s. He migrated to the United States in Chicago in 1987 and became the renowned lead singer for ‘Equal Rights Band’. A short time after he founded ‘Natural Force Band’. IJAHKNOWAH moved to Atlanta in 1998 to produce his first recorded single “Down in Jamaica”, followed by “Free your mind” and “This is the day”, a collaboration with Messenger Selah and Ras Igel. In 2013 he recorded an album with the legendary Dennis (Jah D) Fearon. In 2013 he formed the ‘IJAHKNOWAH AN B R A P’ band. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/reggae-lover/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

From the album Dub Cmd - Lost Transmissions Out on the 28th December 2020 for FREE DOWNLOAD www.dubophonic.com [Lost Transmissions] is a collection of music created by Dub Cmd in 2019, which the original works were lost. This small musical treasure was located in a forgoten folder and includes self-released or unreleased work of the artist, as well as some collaboration with O.L.M. from Italy and Mantsche from Austria, which were never officially released. Last but not least, we included “Still”, a bonus dub-stepper Track based on a poem by Count Ossie. Give thanks for downloading and listening, guidance and love!

In this episode, members of the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) describe defense strategies. Working together with ARA, SHARP, individuals and families under threat from racist skinhead violence they co-developed the support strategy they called House Defense; they also trained themselves in security and offered basic support to local groups. The mutual aid that was established created a community-wide bond many still feel today. Show Notes Transcript Credits: Producers: Celina Flores, Erin Yanke, Mic Crenshaw Editors: Erin Yanke and Icky A. Interviews for this episode: Annette Newelle, Celina Flores, and Erin Yanke Story editors: Celina Flores, Erin Yanke, Icky A., Mic Crenshaw, Moe Bowstern Visual archivist: Julie Perini Mastering: Colin Casserd Music: (in order of appearance) Xylo Zico, LG17, Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton, and Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/idhh/support

Sintonía: "Corn Bread & Butter" - Roland Alphonso with Eric Morris & Drumbago All-Stars "Bridge View" (aka "Bridgeview Shuffle") - Roland Alphonso with The Matador All-Stars; "Humpty Dumpty" - R.A. with Eric Morris & Drumbago All-Stars; "Feel so Fine" - R.A. with Derrick and Patsy; "Mean to Me" - Roland Alphonso; "Shuffling Jug" - R.A. with Clue J. & The Blues Blasters; "Another Moses" - R.A. with Count Ossie & His Warrickers; "Hully Gully Rock" - R.A.; "Blackberry Brandy" - R.A.; "Marjorie" - R.A. with Alvin & Cecil; "Sweetie Pie" - R.A. with Monty & Roy & Drumbago & His Orchestra; "Green Door" - R.A.; "My Forty Five" - R.A. with Eric "Monty" Morris; "Proof Rum" - Roland Alphonso; "We´ll Meet" - R.A. with Roy & Millie; "Back Beat" - Roland Alphonso; "Romantic Shuffle" - R.A. with The Shiners Escuchar audio

Macka.B has always been interested in music. At a very young age, he was impressed by the heavyweight sound system Lord Barley, playing in the blues party next door. The vibrant reggae beat found a place in his heart that remains there to this very day. At school, he played the violin and he joined the school choir. At home he was getting inspiration from Reggae music, listening to such greats as Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Count Ossie, to name but a few. On leaving school he sought a career in engineering. He obtained a technical apprenticeship at Ever Ready, but redundancy due to factory closure ended that career, which proved to be a blessing in disguise. He started to practice D.J.ing at home gaining inspiration from legends such as U-Roy, I-Roy, Big Youth, Prince Far-I, etc. It was also at this time that Macka.B decided to accept the Ras Tafari faith, which is the central part of his life. He and some friends started a sound system called Exodus, which just happened to be the same sound that Macka.B used to listen to as a little youth. The sound was passed down from father to sons and renamed Exodus. Macka B's new album Macka B Website

This ya mix was done by Scratch Famous for Tom Chasteen's (DubClub) show Meditation of Sound on Dublab Radio. I put together this mix highlighting some of my favorite tunes, some exclusive Japanese reissues and original music, and the exciting new voice of Deadly Dragon’s own Jonny Go Figure. 1. Don Drummond – Last Call (Coxsone Pre) 2. Matt Sounds –Seven Samurai (G Stone/Overheat) 3. Justin Hinds – Why I should Worry (Treasure Isle/Push Music) 4. Helmsley Morris – Think I’m a Fool (Clancy’s Pre) 5. Bob and Tyrone – I Don’t Mind (Studio One Pre) 6. Gloria Crawford – You Miss Me (Treasure Isle / Push Music) 7. Prince Buster – All My Loving (Fab) 8. Matt Sounds – Baku Steady (G Stone / Overheat) 9. Lee Thompson Ska Orchestra Feat. Bitty McLean – Fu Manchu (Axe Attack Records) 10. Dave Barker – Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying (Upsetter Pre) 11. Tommy McCook – Psychedelic Reggae (Treasure Isle / Push Music) 12. Hippy Boys – Nigeria (Gay Feet) 13. Winston Turner & Untouchables – Apollo 13 Explosion (Pisces) 14. Sounds Unlimited – Middle East Skank (Scorpio) 15. Cornell Campbell – Magic Spell ( Jackpot) 16. Mudies All Stars – Theme From The Gun Court (Moodisc) 17. Heptones – Love Without Feeling (Jungle) 18. Inge Larsen – Love Is Gone (Moodisc) 19. John Holt – Gone Is Love (Moodisc) 20. Mudies All Stars – Kick Them Face (Moodisc) 21. Vin Gordon – Red Blood (Studio One) 22. Dub Specialist – Bionic Dub (Studio One) 23. Dubforce – Liar Dub (Dubforce/Overheat) 24. Lee Perry & Upsetters – Upsetters Shuffle Dubfiles remix (Beatnik/Pressure Sounds) 25. God Sons – South East Trumpet (Southeast) 26. Don D Junior – Zion Youth (Fe Me Time) 27. Freddy McKay – I’m a Free Man (Studio One) 28. Lloyd Crosdale – Set Me Free (London Records) 29. Tony Brown – Inflation (London Records) 30. Slowly Sounds Feat. Courtney John – The Right Way (Slowly Sounds) 31. Skatalites – Ceiling Bud (Ximeno) 32. H2O – Medusa Pt. 2 (Aquarius / Pressure Sounds) 33. Dennis Brown – When You Are Down Dub (Joe Gibbs) 34. Earl Daley – Love and Happiness (Scorpio) 35. Ronnie Davis – I Won’t Cry (U Man Rites) 36. Diggory Kenrick – Psalm 16 (Now Records) 37. Vivian Jackson & Prophets – Judgement on The Land (Prophets) 38. Diggory Kenrick & Prophets – Vengence (Now Records) 39. Don Drummond Junior – Fisherman Special (Globe Records) 40. The Aquarians – Arise (Aquarius / Pressure Sounds) 41. Tartans – Solid as A Rock (Rythem Force) 42. Tidals – What a Great Day (Sunshot) 43. Dillinger – Dread no Warrior (Gorgon) 44. Rothadam – I Was Born To Be a Rebel (Shella) 45. Karl Bryan & Count Ossie – Black Up (Coxsone) 46. Sound Dimension – Blank 47. Lennie Hibbert – Real Hot (Creation LP) 48. Jackie Mittoo – Who Done It (Coxsone) 49. Lloyd Charmers – Who Done It (Splash) 50. James Eastwood – Darkest Night (Scorpio) 51. Nana MacLean – Give Love Another Try (Studio One) 52. Linval Thompson – Another Man (Marts) 53. Barrington Levy – Deep In The Dark (BL Sounds) 54. Prince Pampidoo – Do You Mommy Know (Lightning) 55. Jah Peter – Silent Zone Rock (Armagedon) 56. Rock It So Good 57. Ringo – New Yorker (Atomic Bum) 58. Pablo Roots – Reggae Mr. Operator (Stepping Lightning) 59. Nice Up The Dance Dub (King Culture) 60. Barry Brown – Nice Up The Dance (King Culture) 61. Stamma Ranks – Stamma Special (King Culture) 62. Linval Thompson – Fussing & Fighting (Medtone) 63. Itals – Dis Yah Time (Hopewell Surviors) 64. Vin Gordon – Harbour View Rock (Rattie Soul) 65. Itals – Ina Dis Ya Time (Spiderman) 66. Trinity – Ready Done (Spiderman) 67. Yellow Man – Over Me (Spiderman) 68. Clement Irie – Mr Magnificent (Hummingbird) 69. Jonny Go Figure – Vinyl Lover (Bent Backs) 70. Koffee – Raggamuffin (Frankie Music) 71. Johnny Osbourne – Let There Be Love (Version City) 72. Johnny Osbourne – No Ice Cream Dub (Special) 73. Salaam Remi – Acid Rain (Acid Rain) 74. Ghost – Come Back Again (Acid Rain) 75. Omar Gosh – New Millenium (Acid Rain)

The Nyabinghi resistance inspired a number of Jamaican Rastas, who incorporated what are known as Nyabinghi chants (binghi) into their celebrations (grounations).The rhythms of these chants were an influence on popular ska, rocksteady and reggae music. Three kinds of drums are used in Nyabinghi music: bass, funde and keteh. The keteh plays an improvised syncopation rooted in Ashanti dance and drumming,[2] the funde plays a regular one-two beat and the bass drum strikes loudly on the first beat, and softly on the third (of fourth) beat. Count Ossie was the first to record nyabinghi and helped to establish and maintain Rasta culture

#Jamaican-percussionist Larry Mcdonald-chat-about-his-music and Gil Scott-Heron Larry McDonald is a Jamaican percussionist. He was born in Port Maria, Jamaica in 1937. McDonald played congas with Carlos Malcolm's band, #Toots and the Maytals and the Count Ossie Band. He plays a wide variety of traditional percussion instruments. McDonald has a nearly 50-year #history of recording and performing with a wide variety of artists, such as #Gil #Scott-Heron, and Taj Mahal (musician). In 2009, McDonald released his first solo album "Drumquestra," which features many of his former collaborators, including Sly Dunbar, Uzziah Thompson of Bob Marley and the Wailers and the former Count Ossie drummers known as the "Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari." in an orchestra of #drummers.

Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari – Bongo Man Nicky Athmani & Hodi Boys Band – Mapenzi Tu Cuban Marimba Band – Wanawake Wa Tanzania Getatchew Kassa - Tezeta Dorothy Masuka – Unamanga Esso Trinidad Steel Band – I Want You Back Alton Ellis – Something You Got Victor Uwaifo - Happy Day From Me To You

Les Tympans de Magellan, c'est un podcast mensuel qui fait voyager vos oreilles. Chaque mois, un nouveau pays mis à l'honneur à travers une liste de morceaux soigneusement choisis. Le pays du mois : Pour ce onzième épisode, on s'éloigne du froid islandais pour retourner vers plus de chaleur et on vous emmène en Jamaïque ! Tracklist : Various artists - "Fire Burn" King Tubby - "Invasion" Ernest Ranglin - "Mento-Time in Jamaica" The Bug feat. Warrior Queen - "Insane" Black Uhuru - "Leaving to Zion" Ras Michael & The Sons of Negus - "Hear River Jordan Roll" Dan-I - "Monkey Chop" Keith Hudson - "Trust & Believe" Sly & Robbie Meet Nils Petter Molvær Feat Eivind Aarset And Vladislav Delay - "Was in the Blues" Wayne Smith - "E20" Poet and The Roots - "Doun Di Road" Singers & Players - "Fit to Survive" Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari - "Song" Equiknoxx - "Congo Get Slap Like A Congo Get Slap" Envoyez vos morceaux Vous avez jusqu'au 16 novembre 2018 23:59 pour envoyer un titre jamaïcain accompagné de votre commentaire à wazoo@xsilence.net Nous sélectionnerons certains des morceaux reçus pour les diffuser et lirons le commentaire associé. • Générique de début : Depeche Mode - "World in My Eyes"• Générique de fin : Wyatt / Atzmon / Stephen - "What a Wonderful World" Retrouver le podcast : XSilence | Facebook | Twitter | iTunes | Podcloud

Tropical North Podcast returns with a two hour selection of global grooves and sonic gems supplied by highly regarded northern selector Graham Newby. Graham, more commonly known as DJ Gripper(Sonic Zoo Radio/Barrow Underground Music Society)effortlessly blends Latin-Jazz, Brazilian and Afro flavours, Psych and Afro-Synth oddities to create a heady sonic excursion full of rhythm and soul. Impressive. Tracklist. 1. Sunburst - Simba Angunuma 2. Odion Iruoje - Love Care 3. Onom Agemo & The Disco Jumpers - Kurifuna 4. Sunburst Band - Enzi Za Utumwani 5. Dikalo - Equality 6. Afrodita - Africa My Dear 7. JariBu Afrobeat Arkestra -BOMB 8. Karl Hector & The Malcouns - Dege Dub 9. Count Ossie & The Rasta Family - Chanting Higher Heights 10. Francis Bebey - Savanah Georgia 11. Professor Wouassa - We Thit 12. The Mauskovic Dance Band - Down In The Basement 13. Fawda Trio - I Got The Blues 14. Sonido Gallo Negro - Cumbia De Sanación 15. Sofiane Saidi - El Ndjoum 16. Onom Agemo & The Disco Jumpers - Aljahalat 17. Spaceheads - Moon Boots (4th Continum Pt 2) 18. Jeevan Anandasivam - Alan When It Was Time 19. Rapossa - Flames 20. André Sampaio & Os Afromandinga - Ecos De Niafunke 21. La Chicherata - El Ultimo Grito Del Tucan 22. Binario - Jazzhole 23. Marisol Brown - Hasta la Noche 24. Bossacucanova - Brasilidade 25. Oribata - Batuki 26. Aillacara 2743 - Para La Libertad 27. Mirtha Y Raul - El Sueño De Andria 28. Jorge Reyes - Pocito 11 www.tropicalnorthpodcast.com

Bombshell RadioPage Liked · April 4 ·Vol.12 in the Music Of Unity series of mixes. Blends of classic Ska, Rocksteady, Roots Reggae & Dub. Cool & good vibes to chill or skank to. 23 tracks. Enjoy :)#ska #rocksteady #rootsreggae #dub #reggae #jamaican #jazz #blues1 What A Good Wood Woman Lee Perry2 Baby Elephant Baba Books Band3 Let's Jump Maytals4 You Are Mine Clive & Naomi5 Mattie Rag Lord Tanamo6 Skinhead Revolt Joe The Boss7 Skinheads A Bash Them Claudette & The Corporation8 My Days Are Lonely Frank Cosmo9 Marjorie Alvin & Cecil10 No Raise No Praise Derrick Morgan11 Man In The Street Don Drummond12 Miss Universe Jimmy Cliff13 Little Did You Know Techniques14 El Pussycat Roland Alphonso15 Dragon Weapon Don Drummond16 The Hop Derrick Morgan17 Rock A Man Soul The Mellow Cats & Count Ossie & The Warrickas18 Duck Soup Drumbagos Orchestra19 Storm Warning Lynn Taitt & The Boys20 Watermelon Baba Brooks21 Natty Dread Dub The Revolutionaries22 Don't Bring Me Your Dreams Ewan McDermott23 Occupation Don Drummond & Tommy McCook

Recorded on 9th of December, 2017 at Le Mellotron, Paris. Tracks from Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, Cem Karaca/Moğollar, Willie Thrasher, Johnnie Frierson, Gacaltooyo Band feat. Faduumina Hilowle & more.

At first! Give thanks to every producer, artist and the people who are involved in this piece of art. Heartical selection for I&i — give it a try! I used to put in the sounds of maracas, one guacharaca and one melodica to share my impression with each and everyone. Music is connection. We can learn the language. Fulljoy everytime! Ites. Let the journey begin: Barry Brown - Dub Confusion Barry Brown - Jukes And Watch Frankie Paul - Worries In The Dance Barry Brown - Ital Rock Johnny Clarke & The Dub Band - Jah Guidance And Dub w/ Melodica (speech from the man called Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace) Barry Brown - Jah Jah We Are Calling Trevor Junior - I&I Time And Dubwise w/ Melodica Junior Reid - Chanting Michael Palmer - Im Still Dancing Big Youth - Political Confusion Sylford Walker - Jah Golden Pen And Dub Rod Taylor - Ethiopian Kings And Dub (speech from the man called Malcolm X) Hugh Mundell - Run Revolution A Come Hugh Mundell - Going Places John Holt - Love And Understanding And Dub Desmond Rhythm Band - One Love In Dub w/ Melodica Al Cambpell - Jah Love Dub Barry Brown - Shoot Up The Town Overstand Ent. - Militancy Dub (preparing for Sabbath – blessing the chalice and more..) Count Ossie & Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari - Sams Intro ––– Skits: • Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace speech taken from the movie "Rockers", released 1978. • Malcolm X speech taken from "Democracy is Hypocrisy" • Sounds recorded with Mic ––– used Equipment: Rane Sixty-Four, 2xTechnics 1200, SD-1 Dubsiren, Melodica, Maracas, Gucharaca, Ableton For promotional use only © 2017 compiled, mixed and arranged by Di CAPTAiN Wuppertal, GERMANY www.facebook.com/dicaptain dicaptain38@gmail.com

Larry McDonald is a Jamaican percussionist, born in Port Maria in Jamaica in 1939. Larry first started to play congas with #Carlos Malcolm band in the 1960s and also with Toots Hibbert of the Grammy Award winning band Toots and the Maytals as well as the Count Ossie Band. He plays a wide variety of traditional percussion instruments.McDonald has a nearly 50 year history of recording and performing with a wide variety of artists, such as #GilScott-Heron, and Taj Mahal. In 2009, McDonald released his first solo album "Drumquestra" on which he united many of his former band mates from across his career, in an orchestra of drummers, including Sly DunbarUziah Thompson a.k.a. "Sticky" of Bob Marley and the Wailers and the former Count Ossie drummers under their later mantle "Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari" drummers. Drumquestra also featured former frontmen from bands Larry performed and recorded with, including Toots Hibbert, Bob Andy, #Mutabaruka, Stranger Cole and Dollarman. The album was recorded at a live session at Harry J Studios in Kingston Jamaica by Steel Pulse producer Sidney Mills for Malik Al Nasir's MCPR label in the UAE, who released the album in 2009. MCRP also released two singles off the album the same year, "Head Over Heels" Featuring Dollarman and Sly Dunbar and "Set The Children Free" Featuring Toots Hibbert, the latter of which was subsequently re-mixed for dance-floors by Lenny B. Shortly after the album was released, Larry was honoured in July 2011, at the 14th annual 'Tributes to the Greats' award ceremony in Jamaica, with a lifetime achievement award for his 50 year contribution to Jamaican music. On Friday 22 March 2013 Larry took to the stage at The UN General Assembly in NYC with Steel Pulse as part of the UNESCO's International Slavery 

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24th, 1938, Campbell earned the nicknames "Prince" for his pre-music career as a street boxer and "Buster" after Jamaican Labour party leader Sir Alexander Bustamante. He fronted numerous now-obscure groups before becoming Dodd's security guard-cum–personal assistant–cum-selector. It was here where Campbell learned the machinations of Jamaica's music industry, knowledge he used in becoming his own sound system operator and the owner of record store Buster's Record Shack. Campbell's "Voice of the People" system quickly became one of the island's most revered, rivaling legends like Dodd and Duke Reid. Campbell produced and released his first single, "Little Honey"/"Luke Lane Shuffle," under the name Buster's Group in 1961, the same year he would produce ska group the Folkes Brothers' beloved "Oh Carolina." On that track, as on many subsequent songs, Campbell asked guitarist Jah Jerry to focus on the song's afterbeat — the weaker part of a musical beat — versus the more typical downbeat. The shift, combined with the use of nyabingi drummers Count Ossie and His Wareikas, would mark a huge influence on the development of ska music. Campbell would produce 13 songs during the "Oh Carolina" session, each one becoming a nationwide hit.

Nyabinghi is the oldest of the Mansions of Rastafari. These Rastafari are the strictest out of the six or so major groups. They pledge "love to all human beings", and do not believe in violence, because they believe that only Jah has the right to destroy. They make this pledge because of the power of words, believing that only when all of Jah's children make the pledge together, the oppressors will be destroyed. In addition, they are often non-violent or follow the just war theory.The Nyabinghi resistance inspired a number of Jamaican Rastas, who incorporated what are known as Nyabinghi chants (binghi) into their celebrations (grounations).[citation needed] The rhythms of these chants were an influence on popular ska, rocksteady and reggae music. Three kinds of drums are used in Nyabinghi music: bass, funde and keteh. The keteh plays an improvised syncopation rooted in Ashanti dance and drumming,[2] the funde plays a regular one-two beat and the bass drum strikes loudly on the first beat, and softly on the third (of fourth) beat. Count Ossie was the first to record nyabinghi and helped to establish and maintain Rasta culture

Larry McDonald is a Jamaican percussionist, born in Port Maria in Jamaica in 1939. Larry first started to play congas with #Carlos Malcolm band in the 1960s and also with Toots Hibbert of the Grammy Award winning band Toots and the Maytals as well as the Count Ossie Band. He plays a wide variety of traditional percussion instruments.McDonald has a nearly 50 year history of recording and performing with a wide variety of artists, such as #GilScott-Heron, and Taj Mahal. In 2009, McDonald released his first solo album "Drumquestra" on which he united many of his former band mates from across his career, in an orchestra of drummers, including Sly DunbarUziah Thompson a.k.a. "Sticky" of Bob Marley and the Wailers and the former Count Ossie drummers under their later mantle "Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari" drummers. Drumquestra also featured former frontmen from bands Larry performed and recorded with, including Toots Hibbert, Bob Andy, #Mutabaruka, Stranger Cole and Dollarman. The album was recorded at a live session at Harry J Studios in Kingston Jamaica by Steel Pulse producer Sidney Mills for Malik Al Nasir's MCPR label in the UAE, who released the album in 2009. MCRP also released two singles off the album the same year, "Head Over Heels" Featuring Dollarman and Sly Dunbar and "Set The Children Free" Featuring Toots Hibbert, the latter of which was subsequently re-mixed for dance-floors by Lenny B. Shortly after the album was released, Larry was honoured in July 2011, at the 14th annual 'Tributes to the Greats' award ceremony in Jamaica, with a lifetime achievement award for his 50 year contribution to Jamaican music. On Friday 22 March 2013 Larry took to the stage at The UN General Assembly in NYC with Steel Pulse as part of the UNESCO's International Slavery 

This episode was pre-recorded for airing on KWTF Sonoma County Radio for January 12, 2016. In this episode, we review Grace Jones’ new memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, available now from Gallery Books. I received a review copy of this memoir from Good Reads and I’m so grateful.Songs Played:Pull Up to the Bumper by Grace JonesI’m Not Perfect, But I am Perfect for You by Grace JonesAn excerpt from grounation music by Count Ossie and his Mystic Revelation of RastafariMy Jamaican Guy by Grace JonesIntro/Afro Disco Beat (Martin Solveig Mix) by Tony AllenI’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango) by Grace JonesWarm Leatherette by Grace JonesLe Freak by ChicLa Vie en Rose by Grace JonesLove is the Drug by Grace JonesThanks for listening! Don’t forget to stay connected on all the social media places!Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 8Tracks, Pinterest, SoundCloudPlease feel free to rate and subscribe and do all the things the robots like to push us up the ladder on I-Tunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/spilling-rubies/id928952261And please support KWTF! Without this DIY Community Radio, I would have no ship in which to sail. Just $10 a month can mean the difference between staying afloat and sinking!Thank you for your support!

This episode was pre-recorded for airing on KWTF Sonoma County Radio for January 12, 2016. In this episode, we review Grace Jones’ new memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, available now from Gallery Books. I received a review copy of this memoir from Good Reads and I’m so grateful.Songs Played:Pull Up to the Bumper by Grace JonesI’m Not Perfect, But I am Perfect for You by Grace JonesAn excerpt from grounation music by Count Ossie and his Mystic Revelation of RastafariMy Jamaican Guy by Grace JonesIntro/Afro Disco Beat (Martin Solveig Mix) by Tony AllenI’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango) by Grace JonesWarm Leatherette by Grace JonesLe Freak by ChicLa Vie en Rose by Grace JonesLove is the Drug by Grace JonesThanks for listening! Don’t forget to stay connected on all the social media places!Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 8Tracks, Pinterest, SoundCloudPlease feel free to rate and subscribe and do all the things the robots like to push us up the ladder on I-Tunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/spilling-rubies/id928952261And please support KWTF! Without this DIY Community Radio, I would have no ship in which to sail. Just $10 a month can mean the difference between staying afloat and sinking!Thank you for your support!

Recorded LIVE @ Las viboras studios on 13/12/15 COVER ART BY: CISCO ESPINAR using> rane rotary mixer gigrac1000 analogic effects 2 x mk5 technics turntables TRACKLIST>>>>> COUNT OSSIE & THE MYSTIC REVELATION OF RASTAFARI narration RASTAFARI THE DREADS ENTER BABYLON 1955-83 souljazzrecordslp312 DEADBEAT ain't no more flowers (feat. fink) WALLS AND DIMENSIONS blkrtz014 RYTHM & SOUND W/ ROD OF IRON Lightning storm SEE MI YAH burialmixlp04 BURRO BANTON zim zim ZENI 2417 ninjatuneltd PAUL ST. HILAIRE love jah now NAH INA IT jatarirecords15 DEADBEAT babylon correction ROOTS AND WIRE wagonrepair46lp LINVAL THOMPSON (unreleased mix) big big girl / ethiopian girl NEXT CUT! (BUNNY LEE & FRIENDS) pressuresounds88 LINVAL THOMPSON a big big girl DREADLOCK SESSIONS jamaicanrecordingslp03 QUASI DUB DEVELOPMENT wolf wolf (fat. lady ann) LITTLE TWISTER VS STIFF NECK pingipung44 NINEY THE OBSERVER you're no dub baby SLEDGE HAMMER DUB IN THE STREET OF JAMAICA burningsoundslp994 R. ALPHONSO & STUDIO 1 ORCHESTRA cleopatra JAMAICAN RECORDING STUDIO studio1 original 7" no.92518 ANTI a perfect world THE EYE OF TIME denovalirecords209

LIVE MUSIC :Jamaican Mento and Folk Songs Before Reggae  Mento is a style of Jamaican music that predates and has greatly influenced ska and reggae music. Mento typically features acoustic instruments, such as acoustic guitar, banjo, hand drums, and the rhumba box a large mbira in the shape of a box that can be sat on while played. The rhumba box carries the bass part of the music. Lord Flea and Count Lasher are two of the more successful mento artists.Mento is often confused with calypso, a musical form from Trinidad and Tobago. Genres of music from Jamaica:Kumina Niyabinghi Mento Ska Rocksteady Reggae Sound systems Lovers rock Dub Dancehall Dub poetry Toasting Raggamuffin Roots reggae Reggae fusion Ska Punk Sound System: Mobile sound systems that played American hits became popular in the 1950s in Kingston, Jamaica. Major figures in the early sound system scene included Duke Reid, Prince Buster and Clement "Coxsone" Dodd. In 1958, due to a shortage of new material, the first local rhythm and blues bands, most influentially the duo Higgs and Wilson (Joe Higgs and Roy Wilson), began recording to fulfil the local demand for new music. Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s, and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. The first ever ska recording was made by Count Ossie, a Nyabhingi drummer from the rasta community. It is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the upbeat. In 1960s, ska was the dominant music of Jamaica . www.crsradio.com , www.caribbeanradioshow.com call in on 661-467-2407  email caribbeanradioshoe@gmail.com  (C)all rights reserved  caribbeanradioshow /crsradio 2014

  Subscribe to Feed-Pod & check out the new Feedpod Tumblr of greatness. In the summer 1970, reeds master Rahsaan Roland Kirk founded the Jazz and Peoples Movement in order to promote the visibility of the artform on mainstream television. Jazz musicians wanted to re-assert the dignity of their work to the very powers that threatened that dignity— a privately owned mass media that aggressively censored natural black inventions like collective improvisation. Their tactic: to collectively interrupt live tapings of talk shows, most notably the Merve Griffin Show and the Dick Cavett Show, and erupt into full jazz concerts with instrumentalists, poets, and singers all present and participating. Once the concerts were underway it was hard to wrest the artists from the screen without expressing that tacit hostility to their form that they were there to protest, and so jazz had a moment’s notice, and as a result musicians like Lee Morgan, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Rahsaan himself, did get the opportunity to present the less commercial face of Jazz music to the most commercial face their is— live nationally syndicated television programs. Out of this movement came experiments like David Sandborn’s show Night Music and the lesser known John Lewis Show. Today we have The Roots as “house band” on the Jimmy Fallon Show, which ranges from heartening to embarrassing depending on your mood. This month’s Feed is a compilation of the interruptions staged by the Jazz and People’s Movement. We went into the archives, the archives entered us, it was not science but it was so scientifical.  Featuring:  Rahsaan Roland Kirk  Yusef Lateef  The Pharaohs  Kain The Art Ensemble of Chicago Kamau Braithwaite Tony Williams  Cannonball Adderley  Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation Last Poets Ahmad Jamal Edzayawa Max Roach The Watts Prohpets Jyoti Peter Tosh Mf Doom Alice Coltrane Amiri Baraka ASAP Rocky Billie Holday Norma Winstone Bobby Callender  Onra  Robert Creeley Langston Hughes  Freddie Hubbard Roy Ayers  Sun Ra