Valuable collection
Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 12/23/2004
(3 out of 5 stars)
"If you have an interest in Jamaican musical forms such as ska, blue beat and reggae, you are bound to be intrigued by this collection of its antecedents. In the 1950s, Jamaican popular entertainment was largely driven by the mobile sound systems which pumped out American R&B records, discovered from the American radio stations that were picked up in Jamaica, notably those from Louisiana, to a dance-hungry public.
Examples of the sort of records played can be found on Stateside's Original Jamaican Sound System and But Officer! compilations.
By 1958, American tastes were changing and it was harder to find the sorts of releases that the Jamaican audiences required. The response was to herd up some local musicians in a studio and produce some recordings for exclusive sound system play, as at this time few Jamaicans owned record players. Duke Reid was probably the first to do this, quickly rivalled by Sir Coxsone Dodd, Prince Buster, DE Dunkley, Simeon Smith and others, who mostly drew from the same pool of top-notch musicians, many of them veterans of the dance and jazz bands of the forties and fifties, eventually fronted by a new breed of vocalists: Laurel Aitken, Derrick Morgan, Owen Gray, Prince Buster.
Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that from the start the material they performed was home grown, though some of the songs bear close resemblances to existing songs such as Flip Flop And Fly and Let The Good Times Roll. Compiler Laurence Cane-Honeysett has rounded up a representative selection, many of which appear on CD for the first time. As Mike Atherton says in his extensive and valuable sleeve notes, "some are seeing their first-ever re-issue 40 years after they were recorded, and a few weren't released in Britain at all."
These exemplary recordings clearly show how ska came into being by 1962, in the first flush of Jamaican independence, and more importantly make a great listen in their own right"
Track Listings (17) - Disc #1
