Paul Sullivan - Mixtape #4: Jamaican Soul

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Mixtape #4: Jamaican Soul

Wednesday, 12 August 2009 23:49

It's a funny one, Jamaican music. On the one hand it has a horribly diluted mainstream image and a reputation for attracting white, stoner, aki-sack-kicking, student-jugglers with dreads. On the other it's one of the most culturally distinctive and influential music forms to have emerged from the 20th century, having infiltrated almost every genre known to mankind from hip hop to techno, pop & punk.

My personal relationship with Jamaican music has been on and off. Once I'd discovered the many smaller rivulets that branched off from Reggae's main-stream, I quickly became besotted with dub -- something about those stripped down riddims, ridiculously heavy bass tsunamis, and the idea of all that dusty, creaky home made equipment being tweaked like crazy in beat up studio shacks.

Books like Lloyd Bradley's engaging Bass Culture offered erudite overviews, but my interest was maintained and expanded in real time via the steady flow of excellent reissues and compilations put out by UK labels like Steve Barrow's Blood & Fire and the lovely Soul Jazz Records. Blood & Fire anthologies like Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamdown, Dub Gone Crazy and Dubwise & Otherwise and Soul Jazz's excellent Studio One comps and Various %Dynamite series were -- and are -- excellent introductions to the breadth and diversity of JA music.

DJing with "7s only" aficionados like Casey from Thundertone Records helped too. Being a devout atheist I've never really been big on the more roots/righteous aspects of JA music (my hair really wouldn't dread well anyway) but I've lapped up pretty much everything else, especially the early rhythm & blues-influenced stuff, dub, ska, rocksteady, bits of dancehall...

And that's what you'll find here: a collection of soulful, feelgood JA music that straddles genres and slays parties. Click on individual tracks for YouTube clips or download the whole thing with one easy click here. Irie. Now where did I put that aki-sack...

Fool For Love - Prince Jazzbo

Rapper Robert & Jim Brown - Minister For Ganja

Buddy-by, Buddy-by - Johnny Osbourne

This Is Another Festival - Jackie Edwards

Ali Baba - John Holt

Armageddon Time - Willie Williams

Uptown Top Ranking - Donna & Althea

Slipping Into Darkness - Carl Bradney

People Make The World Go Round - Hortense Ellis

Westbound Train - Dennis Brown

Get Involved - Freddie McGregor

Woman Of The Ghetto - Phyllis Dillon