Kingston 1970s Overview

Kingston’s emergence as a significant music centre can be attributed to two factors. The first is geographic: Jamaica was close enough to the United States to be strongly influenced by its music—New Orleans, Louisiana, radio stations could be heard in Kingston, and sailors regularly returned to Jamaica with rhythm-and-blues records that were made in the United States—but far enough away to avoid being simply absorbed by it. The second is political: because the U.S. government sought to isolate Cuba, Kingston replaced Havana as the music capital of the Caribbean region.

Jamaica’s distinctly lopsided rhythms (part New Orleans, part local traditional music) were developed throughout the 1960s by several rival hustlers who served as both label owners and producers. The most innovative of the bunch were Studio One’s founder, Coxsone Dodd, and his eccentric in-house engineer, Lee Perry, who produced important tracks by Bob Marley. But Chinese-Jamaican businessman Leslie Kong, a former restaurateur, with his Beverley’s label, was initially more successful. His productions dominated the movie The Harder They Come (1972), and he organized Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” session, which between them more or less introduced reggae to the world at large. Kong’s premature death in 1971 left the way open for others such as Dodd, Joe Gibbs, and Duke Reid, who made sweet and light music at Treasure Isle on Bond Street.

This producer-dominated setup was upstaged by Island Records boss Chris Blackwell, who believed that Marley could become an international star and provided the resources for recording and marketing his albums until his vision was realized. Yet, for all Marley’s enormous influence on the rest of the world, Kingston’s studio experimenters had at least as much long-term impact. The approach of toasters such as I-Roy and Big Youth, who improvised “talk-overs” while engineers remixed rhythms of previously recorded backing tracks, was the direct antecedent of American hip-hop; and “dub” producers such as King Tubby and Perry pushed their primitive equipment to the limit, introducing avant-garde notions of rhythm, arrangement, and structure that had an enormous influence on many producers working with state-of-the-art equipment around the world.