Jazz Articles

Various Artists: Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae

by Chris May
October 1, 2009

The lovingly conceived, brilliantly executed, multi-platform Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae aims to achieve the same sort of museum piece-to-modernity transformation for Jamaican rocksteady that Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit, 1996) created for Cuban music of an earlier era. As with Buena Vista, there's a CD, a movie and a package tour. The CD features eight surviving rocksteady vocal stars of the late 1960s revoicing some of their biggest hits of the era (or those of departed contemporaries), accompanied ...

Barry Brown: Rich Man Poor Man 1978-80

by AAJ Staff
February 4, 2004

During its roots heyday in the '70s, Jamaican reggae was a virtual zoo of vocalists, musicians, and producers. The incestuous relationships these hundreds of artists maintained make it even more difficult to sort out their individual contributions today. To make it big in those days, all you had to do was find yourself a sound system and move sweaty bodies all night long. No small task.

Of course, the difficulty of sorting all the details out from a ...

King Tubby: The Roots of Dub/Dub from the Roots

by AAJ Staff
November 1, 2003

If you want to know where hip-hop came from, you can't ignore dub. If you want to check out early rap, you better be aware of toasting. All of those genres are products of the ghetto, inseparably tagged to the African diaspora. (Like most inventions of American popular music, as this blues/jazz/funk/hip-hop lover can readily attest.)

If you want to properly dig this music, go for the roots. A large number of those tentacles lie in the largest ...