After a recent rise in COVID-19 cases, Jamaica is tightening its testing restrictions for visitors. Starting March 10, anyone arriving in Jamaica will be required to present a negative COVID-19 test, taken within three days of their arrival. Previously, tests were accepted from up to 10 days before. The order applies to all travelers aged [...]

Neville O’Riley Livingston, the Jamaican vocalist better known as Bunny Wailer, died on March 2 at Medical Associates Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, at age 73. A founding member of The Wailers alongside Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, Wailer went on to become a reggae icon in his own right. Wailer traveled and performed sporadically, each [...]

Of the many innovations Jamaican music has offered to the world over the past 50 years, the lyrical art of “toasting” has had perhaps the most profound and long-lasting impact. A stylised, poetical form of chatting and scatting, it was brought to prominence in the early 1970s by the reggae deejay U-Roy, who has died [...]

With the COVID-19 pandemic instituting a new normal defined by physical distancing, reggae legend Beres Hammond will put his own spin on six-feet-apart protocols when he gets up close and personal with Love From a Distance. On Sunday night, February 28, the world renowned vocalist and his band will take the stage for an exclusive [...]

For as long as there have been soundsystems, there have been DJs toasting them. Known as “the originator”, U-Roy was far from the first, but nobody had made a significant impact outside Jamaica before him. In 1970, his album Version Galore landed in London courtesy of Trojan Records. We’d never heard anything like it. There [...]

A lost Peter Tosh master recording is unearthed in this clip from Studio 17 – The Lost Reggae Tapes, a 2019 documentary about the Jamaica’s legendary Randy’s Records studio. “Formed by a Chinese-Jamaican couple in the early ‘60s in Kingston, Jamaica, Randy’s Records started as a used record store, then grew to house a reggae [...]