Saturday, June 10, 2006  

Jeff Chang points out a great piece by Peter S. Scholtes on the late Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker in this City Pages blog. (And the story is hyperlinked to the hilt, which I love.)

Anybody who has tried to trace the routes of Jamaican music history will appreciate the work Scholtes did; it's so hard to unpack all the different stories and get a "definitive" tale (as if anything can be definitive) of somebody's life. "Versioning" isn't just a staple of the Jamaican recording industry; it's a part of the musicians' memories as well.

But versioning isn't just a problem when trying to write about Jamaican music history; it's something that historians covering any topic must contend with. Oral history is only as reliable as a person's memory.

One thing that sets apart the telling of Jamaican music from so many others is that so little was written down during the intitial studio ventures in the 1950s and the recording rush of the 1960s, where music was churned out at a dizzying pace. Unlike jazz sessions from this era, where you have studio photos and recording logs and personnelle listings, recording dates for mento, ska, and rock steady records were much more casual affairs. Plus, newspapers like the Gleaner generally treated ska and such as a "downtown" phenomenen, not worthy of coverage in an "uptown" paper. So there's not a lot of written data that can be used to cross-reference the oral histories.

Also, nobody really knew the music would grow beyond the island, so why bother to keep track? It was about creating local hits for radio and dancehalls, not about nabbing the No. 1 slot in Britain, Cologne, Tokyo, and wherever else Jamaican music is now revered.

In 2004 I got a first-hand education on the trickiness of memory while writing a feature about the influence of jazz on ska. Right click & save as to download a PDF of the article.

Just recently I had to contend with conflicting histories when writing my concert review of Lee "Scratch" Perry. The Gleaner reported that it had been 44 years since Scratch performed in Jamaica; the Observer said it was 30-something years. I didn't know who to believe, and I didn't have time to scan David Katz's People Funny Boy to try and figure it out (if it's even mentioned in there). In retrospect, the Gleaner's number seems unreasonable; it means that Scratch hadn't performed in Jamaica since 1962. He didn't move away from the island until 1984 (or so), and while I know he's mostly a studio guy, 22 years seems like a long time for him to be off stage in Ja even though he lived there. But who knows? I'm sure Scratch doesn't.

Another PDF to DL: The first English-language issue of Germany's Riddim magazine can be nabbed for free. (Right click, save as.) They are up to issue No. 4 now, but the first issue has been sold out for a minute.

Wow, all that writing up there looks like an original blog entry. I thought I forgot how to write without the lure of ducats. (Hey, even 25 bones is better than nothing.)

Posted by CP | Link |

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