King Dubmatix coming in with brand new album out on Echo Beach label. 11 vocal tracks with plethora of riddim riders in all kinds of styles and shapes. Including lovely Blue Monday rendition by none other than Barry Ashworth outta Dub Pistols institution, alongside 3 closing dubwise instrumental tracks. This musical delivery sounds groovy, phat, bouncing and flowing in perfect blend of fresh forward roots and solid foundation future classics.
Marshall Neeko opening up 2023 with already two riddim albums with various artists. This time reworking Swing Easy riddim and General Penitentiary riddim bringing back that late 90’s sound.
Tiny desk concerts from NPR music are tiny concerts in small rooms. This time it’s Adrian Sherwood’s living room jamming with legendary Andy Horace supported by drums, cello, guitar, bass, keys, trumpet, guitar and cello while dubbing FXs are preformed by maestro himself. Fulljoy!
Dominant and subversive versions of Africa and African history reproduced the dynamic outlined above but on an international scale. In Britain in the 1980s imperial relations were being re-imagined in the context of humanitarian aid. Black youths in Britain wielded their African heritage as a tool to build their communities and give voice to their analysis. Meanwhile the mainstream press, and charitable structures,were also building a version of Africa; one of helpless victims of natural disasters.
Given such a context, the ‘performance’ that is being considered here contains dialogues that traverse the African diaspora and are based on the acquisition of‘oral skills’ in Creolised language, which acted as a mode of response to the imposition of European culture on non-European peoples. Resistance became most evident in the contested spaces constructed around specific types of language-use that expressed an alternative black subjectivity that bridged intergenerational gaps within black communities.
The use of particular linguistic forms, both oral and scribal, continued the type of ‘pan Caribbean consciousness‘ that was necessary for the Windrush Generation’s survival and was passed down to the generations born in Britain thereafter. For many deejays, therefore, the world view expressed through the usage of Standard English reduced them to the voiceless, passive victims of a Eurocentric historical bias. By blending several aspects of Jamaican oral culture with their own local argot, deejays verbally presented critiques of certain entrenched ideas, for instance, poetry as an exclusively white domain.
This type of engagement was exemplifed in a lyric performed on Diamonds Sound System by the British deejay Papa Benji, which suggested that ‘poetry me better than Shakespeare, and me voice gone clear everywhere’.
The deejay thus became the veritable keeper of memories, for once the word was performed, recorded and disseminated, it became an artefact; a historical document. It also enabled the performers to present their own arguments, in their own words and on their own terms in a ‘commonly agreed language’ that countered their ‘social problem’ status.
William ‘Lez’ Henry (2012) Reggae, Rasta and the Role of the Deejay in the Black British Experience, Contemporary British History, 26:3, 355-373, DOI:10.1080/13619462.2012.703024
Original Ras Jammy selection on My Analog Journal with just under 50 minutes of finest roots rock reggae and dubwise. 100% vinyl with crackle, hum and nuff warmth.
Privileged to listen to some early mixes in the making of this master piece, Jah Billah confirms this album opens up a new chapter for Balkan regggae.
Mr. Pilton says:
After two years brand new reggae album is here.
HARIS PILTON meets legendary JOSEPH COTTON aka JAH WALTON on an album called MR CLASSIC. The album includes 14 songs in an old fashion reggae style.
Enjoy
From press release:
MR CLASSIC is the latest album from Joseph Cotton in collaboration with producer Haris Pilton.
Legend Joseph Cotton aka Jah Walton (born Silbert Walton, 1957, St. Ann, Jamaica) is a reggae deejay and singer active since the mid-1970s. He recorded his first song named “Gourmandizer” with Joe Gibbs in 1976, under the name Jah Walton. He then moved to Harry Mudie owner of Moodisc label, recording popular tracks such as “Stay A Yard And Praise God” and “Touch Her Where She Want It Most” (the title track from his debut album).
In the mid-1980s he began recording under the name Joseph Cotton, immediately having success. He reached No.1 in the UK charts with “No Touch The Style”, leading to a television appearance on Channel 4’s Club Mixprogramme in 1987. Several more reggae chart hits followed in the form of “Things Running Slow”, “Pat Ha Fe Cook”, “Tutoring”, “Judge Cotton”, and “What Is This”.
Cotton continued to perform and record into the 1990s, 2000s and the present day. He now lives in France where he performs at venues throughout the country and elsewhere in Europe both solo and in collaboration with other reggae artists
Marshall Neeko been rocking riddim remakes for a while now. Check out Night Nurse featuring classic cuts from Anthony B, Gregory Isaacs, Lady Saw and more…
By 1960, several Jamaican institutions had begun to show an interest in the counterculture, and to contribute to the demarginalisation of the Rastafari movement which had previously been repressed. One such institution was the University of the West Indies, which put the Rastafari on its agenda. In the course of these trajectories, Jamaican public opinion, which had predominantly perceived the Rastafari movement to be a crowd of violent criminals, fools and outcasts, changed successfully.
Particularly, reggae music (as the emancipation of Jamaican popular music) was co-opted. The result of the blending of Afro-Jamaican Burru and Kumina drum techniques and folk traditions with Afro-American musical styles (including jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul and swing) led to the creation of mento, ska, rocksteady and reggae styles like dancehall, dub, lovers, raggamuffin, rockers and roots, which ‘exerted a tremendous influence on the development of post- World War II popular music globally’. The musical film The harder they come (1972), starring Jimmy Cliff, contributed enormously to the transnationalisation, popularisation and commercialisation of roots reggae. Not until this style developed, did reggae lyrics exhibit the spirituality and socio-political engagement that came to be seen as the hallmark of roots reggae. And, clearly no one represented the Rastafari rhetoric and feelings of this genre to the world more ably and persuasively than Bob Marley.
In fact, conscious reggae music, with its recreational, critical and inspirational dimensions, would soon transcend the Rastafari milieu and succeed in conquering a global audience. Today, Rastafari not only has observer status in the United Nations, but even more importantly it has become part of everyday culture in Jamaica, and even abroad. However, the various Rastafari mansions relate differently to reggae music: whereas Boboshanti reject reggae as part of their culture and only consider drumming and chanting as true Rastafari music, the Theocracy Reign Order of the Nyahbinghi describes its relationship to reggae through the metaphor:
DJ Kool Herc, the chief architect of hip-hop, was born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica. At the age of twelve, in the winter of 1967, Campbell moved to Bronx, New York. The year he migrated to America, sound-system culture in Jamaica had a ubiquitous presence in Kingston’s lower-class neighbourhoods. As a twelve-year-old preteen now living in the Bronx, Campbell already possessed a persistent reggae and sound-system consciousness having experienced the innovative music of Prince Buster, the Skatalites, Don Drummond, and dancehall deejay U-Roy.
At eighteen, Campbell attempted to recreate the Jamaican dancehall experience in the Bronx by spinning the latest Jamaican reggae records at neighbourhood parties, but his young African-American audience was not feeling the reggae beat and did not comprehend the Jamaican patois rhymes of sound-system MCs known as toasters. As DJ Kool Herc, Campbell shifted to playing funk records, but his reggae background caused him to favour funk with heavy-weight bass lines and lively percussive drumming. Kool Herc’s record selections were transmitted through hi-fi stereo equipment that spoke with the same awesome power and sonic quality of a roots Jamaican sound system. The selector, as a deejay is called on a reggae sound system, though using one turntable-the norm during the ’60s and ’70s- was still capable of altering the arrangement of a tune spinning off a record on the turntable platter. The selector skillfully inflicted a completely different sound context on a roots reggae recording by manipulating the controls on the sound system’s amplifier to briefly remove the bass on a tune, accentuate the singing of the song’s vocalist, and highlight the harmony of trumpet, saxophone, and trombone. The selector would create tension in a live remix by bringing back the bass booming like a compact implosion. By the ’70s, the selector had the ability to vary the sonic texture of the recording by creatively deploying reverb and echo chamber to repeat the sweetest elements of a vocal or horn solo and as a special sound effect that dramatized certain aspects of the recording with a live feel.
Kool Herc’s approach to creating something fresh from pre recorded funk on vinyl was different because he used two turntables. But his approach was similar in that he shared the same objective as the selector, which was to do a live remix of the record to heighten the entertainment of his audience. He extended the intoxicating rhythmic feel of percussive conga, bongo, or trap drums sizzling the break of records like Mandrill’s“Fencewalk,” the Incredible Bongo Band’s“Apache,” and the live version of James Brown’s“Give It Up, Turn It Loose” by playing the same record on two turntables using a sound mixer to seamlessly prolong the percussive breakbeats.
Herc pioneered the innovative use of two turntables and a sound mixer as active instruments that became more than passive facilitators, more than just pieces of electronic equipment that merely played what was recorded on vinyl.
These electronic instruments were now used to rearrange prerecorded music to suit the immediate needs of the disco and the dance floor. When DJ Kool Herc rocked a block party, dispatching African American funk with the overwhelming sonic power of a reggae sound system, no other deejay dared to compete.