Ska Ska Ska

Those who know me will tell you, I have a funny relationship to so-called world music. I don't have any Ladysmith Black Mambazo in my collection, can't stand the damn Buena Vista Social Club etc, but I'm a pretty big fan of calypso music through the sixties, Yiddish music, and ... a lot of Jamaican music. Not all, mind you. I'm not cut out for dancehall, and I'm not the biggest Bob Marley fan around, either.

Unfortunately for us, nobody turned on a tape recorder (or a disc or wire recorder) in Jamaica until about 1951, so their legendary jazz scene wasn't really documented. The first studio there was operated by a guy called Stanley Motta, who cut a style called mento, which is the Jamaican version of calyspo. It's more folky, funky, stringed-instrument based and loose-limbed than the more famous Trinidadian stuff. After Motta, another mogul-in-waiting, Ivan Chin, cut a bunch of mento with his group, Chin's Calypso Sextet.

Mento almost had a superstar, Lord Flea (Norman Thomas).


Lord Flea got signed to a major American label (Capitol), made a real good LP, and was featured in a crappy teen flick, Bop Girl Goes Calypso (1957), which starred Bobby Troup and Judy Tyler, known best as the leading lady in Jailhouse Rock Sadly, Flea died in 1959, something to do with his kidneys. Other mento practitioners made it into the next phase of Jamaican music -- ska.

Ska was horn based, with walking bass and skanking guitars. It's forebear was obviously the shuffle rhythms on such records as "Keep A Dollar In Your Pocket" by Roy Milton, which were really popular among local "sound system" dee jays, who spun at dances around Kingston.


Ska has had a longer and more complex development than most Americans know. Its roots are jazz and jump blues, and -- seriously -- ska was in its way the most singular modern blues form. At this point it is hard to think of ska that way, but to hear "Midnight Track" by Owen Gray is to hear Wynonie Harris' West Indian cousin, so to speak. Ska was often referred to as "bluebeat" in its heydey.




John Lennon referred to the instrumental break on the Beatles' "I Call Your Name" as 'the bluebeat part'. Go to 1:10 in this clip and check it out.


The core band of ska -- the style's Funk Brothers analog -- was the Skatalites, several of whom first met or played together in The Alpha Cottage School, a sort of reform school for wayward boys. Influential singer Desmond Dekker also metriculated there. The Skatalites played on most of the influential ska records. At Alpha, they learned how to sightread music real well, and they considered themselves jazz musicians. Listening to the solos on the records on which they played, we see they were really good jazz players.


Ska was gangster music. The very influential Prince Buster was a real live tough guy, and one of the most charismatic artists of ska's golden period.



By about 1965, the sounds of soul had supplanted jump blues as the core influence on Jamaicans, and the smoother rocksteady took over. This Delroy Wilson record is a nice example.


About 13 years later, the Specials would reinvestigate ska in a whole new way, one that would make them the greatest band of their era.