Today and tomorrow, we're listening to Jamaican music. Not new Jamaican music like dancehall. But the old stuff: reggae, ska, rocksteady and dub. For many years, that music was the scene in Jamaica -- and many around the world loved it too. And like many scenes, it came to an end. Tomorrow we'll hear about one place where the musicianship is still alive in Jamaica. Today, The World's Marco Werman tells us about the BEGINNING of the Jamaican scene.
Jamaica's cool musical scene in the 60s and 70s took off thanks to a small piece of technology.
DJ SPOOKY: "The cheapest thing you could get was a radio."
That's Paul Miller, better known to music fans as DJ Spooky.
He's had a long relationship with Jamaican music. First as the son of parents who went there often when he was a kid in the 70s. And continuing today as someone who's just obsessed with the sound, process and evolution of Jamaican popular music.
DJ SPOOKY: "Radio was the first democratic device in the third world. Once the economies of scale kicked in after World War Two, radio really became ubiquitous. So your average person in Jamaica would hear radio coming off the coast of Florida, and they'd want to hear a live version of that. So the bands responded by doing cover versions and those would be played at parties."
"What ends up happening with that is you get a certain saturation, because if everybody can hear those same songs, what you need to do is come up with a new style or a new technique. And so that's where you get this kind of arms race of competition going on. And because of that arms race, people had to come up with new styles every couple of days. And if one rhythm became popular, everybody would get copies of it. Then what really made it go off the scale was adding a live human element of somebody chatting over the record, and that's where you get people like Michigan and Smiley in the later stages, or on some of the early stuff would be of course Dillinger."
Artists like Dillinger were originally called sing-jays. They did their chanting over rhythms that had been dubbed sometimes three or four times, or more. The purveyor of those dub tracks was a sound engineer named King Tubby. As DJ Spooky explains, King Tubby knew how to make the most of the island's limited resources.
DJ SPOOKY: "Back in that time period, even multi-tracking was a really complex situation, and a lot of the Jamaican analog tapes were two-track. What happened was musicians would come into the studio, they'd record on two tracks and they'd try and do what they called dub edits, which is you'd copy those two tracks that somebody had played then layer them with another two tracks, and that's how you'd get this kind of layering going on."
"So a lot of musicians to spice up their tracks would take them to King Tubby. He became the first re-mixer really. So he'd take those layered tapes, and do what they called synchronizing. That's where you can take the voice out, or have a faint echo of it. And this is all done by hand."
"The technical innovation was usually just very crude. Small tape machines, reel to reel, that kind of thing. It's hard for us right now to go back and think about how much beautiful music came out of these small patchwork studios."
Today's dancehall tracks are made on home computer systems. So, those old studios are not exactly thriving anymore. I dropped by the famous Studio One when I was in Kingston. I couldn't make an appointment. Studio One's number isn't even in the phone book.
It's still on the same street, now called Studio One Boulevard. But the building is surrounded by concertina wire, and not much was going on there. So I went by another studio, Sonic Sounds.
It was also quiet, but in the courtyard was a legend, Noel Simms Skully.
SKULLY: "My right name is Noel Bartholemew Simms. The first recording artist in Jamaica."
WERMAN: "And when you say first, does that mean you recorded the very first vinyl in this country?"
SKULLY: "The very first vinyl in this country apart from calypso. Quarter inch tape we recorded on. We had it the hardest way. Because if the singer make a mistake while recording the song, he has to start all over. If the bass player make a mistake we have to start all over. If the drummer make a mistake...any one of the musicians make a mistake while recording we have to start the song from the top to the very last drop."
The process was the same in all the studios, regardless of the style -- reggae, ska, rocksteady, what have you -- even jazz. This song is called "The Russians Are Coming (Take Five)." It's unclear if composer Paul Desmond ever saw royalties from this version. Some would say the Jamaican artists were inspired by Dave Brubeck's version of "Take Five."
Some would say they copied it...even pirated it. Still, it shows that Jamaican musicians ate up everything they heard on those little radios. "The Russians Are Coming (Take Five)" is on a recording Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky compiled last year.
Like a kid let loose in a candy shop, he was given the keys to the vaults of Trojan records, one of the great Jamaican labels of the period. And what he heard in those Trojan vaults made him realize that Jamaica remains the template for what he and many of his re-mixer/producer colleagues do now. Only today, a different technology has replaced the transistor radio.
SPOOKY: "Now of course we have the internet and mash-ups and all this crazy on-line editing. There's people like Danger Mouse, or myself, DJ shadow, you know we're all children of that process. It all goes back to that Jamaican minimalism. And the cool thing is that it's also very multi-cultural. Strangely enough, Trojan records was started by Lee Gopthal, an Indian, with a white Jamaican, Chris Blackwell, and one of Bob Marley's first producers was Leslie Kong, who was Chinese: Chinese-Jamaican. But it's all about how independence came about which is you had people with very specific skill sets which had been cut off from the normal economic routine of the British empire. People are put in a situation where music and creativity become valued because that's how; like same thing happened in the depression in the US where a lot of people were thrown out of jobs and music became more important than ever. But in such a small place, everybody wanted to hear really intense innovation because that's what made their clubs or their parties more interesting. And they just happened to be really irreverent toward normal copyright law."
Maybe today's sensitivity to copyright laws won't allow a repeat of that scene.
But one wonders -- with all the tumult in the world today -- when and where the next creative scene is going to explode -- just like it did in Jamaica in the 60s.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman.
