Crowd welcomes Isaacs’s warm reggae grooves It might well have been 96 degrees in Jamaica this week, a point that the jovial MC at Gregory Isaacs’s performance Wednesday at the Paradise took great pleasure in noting, with Boston stuck in a deep winter chill. Such trivial matters didn’t bother reggae veteran Isaacs though. He soon [...]
Sweet soca for the road It has been a memorable Carnival, I find, and what made it so was the finest of the music. Mark down 2006 as the year in which soca road music finally emerged at the hands of a new, more or less, generation of soca singers either as individuals or in [...]
Alton Ellis for reggae Hall of Fame One of Jamaica’s leading hitmakers, Alton Ellis, who is this year celebrating 50 years in entertainment, will be inducted into the International Reggae and World Music Awards Hall of Fame this year. Ellis will be joined by his Caribbean counterpart, Guyanese Eddie Grant. Both will be honoured during [...]
Understanding Caribbean Music You hear it frequently these days: “What’s happening to Caribbean music? Where is calypso? Where did we get these strange songs with no melody and just boom, boom?†The short answer is that it’s not strange at all. Change is always the norm in popular music; thirty years ago, Lord Shorty, propelling [...]
Sean Paul: “The Trinity” World Tour Riding high off an incredible year that saw him shatter the record for most reggae sales in a single week and had the whole country jamming to “We Be Burnin” and now “Temperature, ” Sean Paul announces the U.S. leg of his “The Trinity” World Tour. On the tour [...]
Mighty Arrow for Music Festival The return of the Mighty Arrow, Montserrat’s most famous soca son, is a feature of the 10th anniversary of the Music Festival this year. The calypsonian of international renown, appeared on the first Music Festival in 1996 and is now the latest in the line-up of quality acts signed this [...]
Keeping Score…..Gold & platinum discs among reggae artistes Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley’s recent gold certification by the Recording Association of America (RIAA) for his smash album Welcome to Jamrock has also helped the disc to further increase sales, following as it did on his double Grammy win. As it turns out, Jamaican artistes, including Damian’s [...]
Good music from the old and not so old Given the deluge of so much passing off for soca, and more so music these days, the release of compilation discs by Sylvester Lockhart (Poser) and Nigel Lewis is a most welcome sound to the ears. Poser recently released another one of his CDs entitled De [...]
Tessanne Chin – Ready to rock the music industry Tessanne Chin’s rock reggae music is a reflection of who she is, a window into her world. “My music is a nice fusion of rock, reggae and soul. A little bit of dancehall influence. It’s everything that describes me, it’s who I am,” said Tessanne who [...]
Jewish reggae artist turns heads with new CD A Hasidic Jewish reggae artist releases a live album and nine months later it cracks the Top 40 albums chart. Next thing we’ll be told is that he isn’t a joke. He is … isn’t he? It would be an exaggeration to say that the release of [...]