Ska

Perhaps it's a coincidence that ska music was developing just as Jamaica was on its way to being granted its independence from the Britain. But there's no denying that by August 6, 1962, ska had become the popular music of its day, giving Jamaica its own sound during the time it became a free nation. But like the island's slogan—"Out of many, one people"—ska was born through the blending of many musical styles.

In the 1930s and 1940s swing jazz spread through Jamaica, mostly through bands on the hotel circuit on the north coast and in Kingston, the nation's capital. By the 1950s R&B began its popular rise, driven by the accessibility of radios that could tune in stations from Miami, New Orleans and as far away as Nashville, Tennessee. Plus, the Armed Forces radio network pumped American music to Jamaica, while nearby Cuban stations could also be pulled in. This era also featured the dawn of the first soundsystem dances, where patrons would attend street parties hosted by promoters spinning the hottest sounds. The music consisted primarily of hot jump-jazz and blues-boogie by the likes of Louis Jordan, Bill Doggett, Rosco Gordon as well as Afro-Cuban music by Perez Prado, Machito and Mario Bauza, swing by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Prima and Lionel Hampton, bebop by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Harold Land, vocal jazz by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan and dashes of calypso and mento by singers like Lord Flea and Count Lasher.

In order to keep people coming to their dances, soundsystem operators like Coxsone Dodd (who later founded the legendary Studio One label, where Bob Marley got his start) and Duke Reid (whose Treasure Isle label battled Dodd for supremacy) had to find the newest, most obscure records to entice the crowd. The discs were acquired through frequent trips to America, trades with U.S. servicemen and mail order, and labels were scratched off to foil snooping competitors. (For instance, it wasn't until years later that patrons found out that Dodd's theme song, "Coxsone Hop," was actually Willis "Gator" Jackson's "Later for the Gator.")

By the late 1950s Dodd decided that another way to get exclusive records was to make them himself. He rented time at Federal Recording Studios and hired local jazz musicians that variously included guitarist Ernest Ranglin, bassist Cluett Johnson, pianists Aubrey Adams and Cecil Lloyd, trombonist Rico Rodriguez, trumpeter Baba Brooks and future members of ska's premier band, the Skatalites, such as drummer Lloyd Knibb and saxophonist Roland Alphonso. They cut shuffle tunes and hard-edged R&B exclusively for sound system use.

Other soundsystem men soon followed, with people like Prince Buster, King Edwards and Duke Reid turning into record producers in order to support their dances. But as these musicians tried to duplicate the U.S. music that was so popular, something funny happened. The woozy, loping beats of Rosco Gordon and the swingin' jive of Louis Jordan was being twisted by the Jamaican musicians, with the second and fourth beats being accented more heavily than in the American music they were emulating. The offbeat accents of Jamaican boogie in the late 1950s morphed into afterbeat or upbeat accents in the 1960s with the creation of ska. In this new style the guitar and piano nipped at the two and the four albeit in an exaggerated, highly syncopated and clipped style, while the horn sections played melody lines borrowed from jazz, Latin music, mento and R&B.

Whether the creation of ska was intentional or a happy accident is open to debate. Everyone from Clement Dodd and Prince Buster to Ernest Ranglin and Lloyd Knibb claimed ska (or at least parts of it) as his own invention. Popular bassist Cluett
Johnson used to call people "Skavoovie," and that's sometimes considered as one of the sources for the music's rubric; another is the onomatopoeic sound that a guitar makes: ska ska ska. Ska started slowing down by the mid-1960s, with bass lines becoming more prominent and vocalists rather than instrumentalists handling the songs' melody lines. The new music, dubbed rocksteady, morphed into reggae at the end of the '60s.

Ska's "second wave" kicked up in Britain in the late 1970s. Artists like the Specials, the English Beat, Madness and others put a punk rock twist on the style. Ska's "third wave" surfaced in the late 1980s and lasted through the mid-1990s, with groups like the Toasters, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt helped propel the music to U.S. chart success, however brief. —Christopher Porter