Hinds, Cure cool down Temperature

Barbadian soca diva Alison Hinds gave a scintillating performance at the Temperature 3 concert last Saturday, at the Queen’s Park Oval, Woodbrook. The show, which was supposed to be the biggest Carnival show for the season, certainly kept it’s promise. Despite the non appearance of Vybz Kartel, aka Adijah Palmer, the show went relatively smoothly.

The announcement that the artiste was not going to be performing was made after the appearance of Jamaican acts Sheeba and Lisa Hyper, who tried to competently sing three of Vybz Kartel’s hits.

Alborosie – on a reggae mission

Ten years ago when Alberto D’Ascola settled in Port Antonio, Portland, all he wanted to do was record some wicked tunes with the biggest names in dancehall/reggae. As it turns out, he is the one making the most noise as singer Alborosie.

The dreadlocked Italian was scheduled to make his first appearance in the United States yesterday with a show at the Arcata Theater Lounge in Arcata, California. It will be one of seven dates in the Golden State for Alborosie whose Escape From Babylon To The Kingdom of Zion album was recently released in the United States.

Queen Ifrica leads IRAWMA with 9 nominations

Singjay Queen Ifrica captured nine nominations in the 29th annual International Reggae and World Music Awards (IRAWMA), and has gone where no other women had gone before in the history of IRAWMA. The official announcement was made exclusively on IRIE FM Radio and CVM TV in Jamaica at 7:15am, yesterday.

The IRAWMA Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday May 2 at the York College Performing Arts Centre, Jamaica, Queens, New York.

Jammin’ in the homeland of reggae star Bob Marley

It’s not that Bob Marley invented reggae, but more than 30 years ago he brought the mystic island beat of Jamaica to the world and we, being impressionable teens, bought the albums.

We nodded along to the soul of the songs of repression and redemption as if we had a clue. Of course we didn’t — we were white kids in Canada. But the universal lyrics of One Love would pulsate through our veins. So when my son put my scratchy copy of Burnin’ under the old stylus he, too, was hooked. Going to Jamaica to see the birthplace of reggae was thrust to the top of his ever-expanding bucket list. I, of course, was along for the ride.

Low prices for high season in the islands

Maybe you’ve always wanted to visit the Caribbean in high season, when its harbors are filled with plump yachts, its restaurants are humming with elegant diners and its resorts are aswarm with wealthy families finding refuge from winter’s chill.

Trouble is, winter vacations in the Caribbean are expensive, and especially in a poor economy, that’s not exactly a turn-on — and even more so for South Floridians, for whom local beaches are just a short drive away.

Ziggy learns from ‘Family Time’

In the process of recording a subsequent Grammy-wining album, Ziggy Marley experienced a renaissance of sorts in his storied career which started in the mid-1980s as the leader of the sibling group, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers.

Marley’s latest solo album, Family Time, earned him his fifth Grammy last Sunday, the most recent award from the Recording Academy coming in the Best Musical Album for Children category.

Tobagonian makes soca debut

Grenada’s reigning Soca Monarch and Road March King, Mr Killa (Hollice Mapp) is in the finals of next week’s Bmobile Blackberry International Soca Monarch competition. On Fantastic Friday at the Queen’s Park Oval, Mr Killa will perform “Swing It Away”, a song which took Grenada by storm last year. The soca star is hoping to create history for Grenada by winning the title.

The last time Mr Killa, who has won the Soca Monarch in Grenada three times, last appeared in the International Soca Monarch competition in 2005, he placed fifth with “Wine If Yuh Wining”.

Hip Hop’s Damon Dash makes the Judgement Yard sojourn

It was early last week that Sizzla Kalonji received the call that hip hop mogul Damon Dash was in the island and needed to make that link. “Naturally, I opened up my house to him,” the Rastafarian artiste told Splash, in reference to his August Town-based studio/house, known as Judgement Yard.

“I have invited Damon to come to Jamaica on several occasions… I told him he should think of buying houses here, do some kind of investment in the island. After all, this is Jamaica and we are about music and playing our part in helping out the suffering people in our community…”

Review: The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2009

The best thing about the yearly Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems compilations– whose title provides you with all the backstory you need on this venerable series collecting 12 months of gems from Jamaica’s premier pop genre– is that they’re consistent enough to act as comforting listening but restlessly inventive enough to surprise you each time out. The consistency runs deep, right down to the jagged-but-dance-friendly rhythmic structure of the music (for a genre as open to outside influence as any in the world, a dancehall tune is recognizable in seconds). It’s there in everything from vocals that rub the near-parodically masculine against a sugary sweetness to themes that explore with the tension between the need to do bad and the urge to do right.

Gateways to Geekery: Dub

Though it isn’t precisely the first kind of music that involves what we now refer to as the remix, dub was arguably the first popular and influential art form to be predicated on creating entirely new music from already-existing recorded elements. Starting in the mid-’60s, Jamaican DJs began rocking dancehalls by creating, or dubbing, stripped-down versions of reggae songs (sometimes big hits, but more often obscure B-sides) that removed almost everything but the bedrock “riddim” of the bass and drums. Gateways To GeekeryBlasting these records over complex, high-powered sound systems, they invited local “toasters,” or MCs, to deliver their own interpretations of the lyrics, usually repetitive call-and-response vocals that kept the crowd happily moving.