By Julian “Jingles” Reynolds, Dennis Howard Ph.D., Roy Black
Jamaica has made significant contributions to worldwide popular culture despite its small size. A testimony to this fact is that in 2015, UNESCO designated Kingston, the creative nucleus, a creative city of music. Despite this considerable designation, very little has been achieved in leveraging this international recognition’s potential.
Coming out of World War 2 in the mid-1940s, Kingston began expressing its identity as a music-driven city with itinerant mento musicians and sheet music entrepreneurs such as Slim and Sam, followed by Alerth Bedasse and Everard Williams, who operated at the corner of Oxford St and Spanish Town Rd near Coronation Market. Kingston grew as a vibrant city of music with sound systems and dance hall centres in west Kingston, such as Chocomo Lawn, Pioneer Lawn, Forrester’s Hall, King’s Lawn, Jubilee Tile Garden, to east Kingston with hot spots such as Bournemouth Club, Success Club, and night clubs like Club Havana, Club Adastra in Rockfort, Glass Bucket in Half-Way-Tree, and Silver Slipper Club in Cross Roads.
Evolution of the Music
The Myrtle Bank Hotel was the premier tourist attraction offering big band music playing American and British popular music. However, the Jamaican masses comprising working class and poor black people flocked on weekends to the bars and dance halls throughout the city, entertained by the blues, jump blues, jazz and pop music of America and England. Later on, indigenous recorded music that was emerging from the Jamaican musicians, singers and producers were added to the playlists of the dance halls.
Leroy Riley, Headley Jones, Jack Taylor and Roy White were the early pioneers of downtown Kingston’s Beat Street/Orange Street music centre. Trading vinyl records imported from the American south, namely New Orleans and Memphis. During the 1940s, the sound system emerged out of the need to amplify the music to reach the masses for entertainment purposes. This was done through speaker systems on tube radios and public address systems. Headley Jones an engineer and musician eventually designed the modern sound system configurations with a simple integrated system which is the foundation of sound system technology.
Following Trinidad and Tobago’s footsteps with calypso, Jamaican mento/Caribbean calypso music burst on the international stage in the 1950s through Harry Belafonte singing calypso. Belafonte, whose parents were Jamaicans, was born in New York City and attended high school at Wolmers Boy School in Kingston, and exposed to the folk /mento culture. Belafonte was one of the world’s first popular music superstars and Hollywood actors. Kingston, in that same period of the late 1950s, gave the world a second mento/calypso music star and actor in Jamaican-born Lord Flea. While Belafonte was selling the first million-selling album, “Calypso”, on the RCA Victor label, Lord Flea was selling hit songs with albums recorded for Capitol Records. Both artists appeared in several Hollywood-produced films. In the 1960s, after producing American-influenced rhythm and blues music, Jamaican musicians created ska and Burru-influenced Rastafarian-inspired Nyabinghi genres.
Beginning In the 1960s and the ska era led by Prince Buster and Millie Small, to the ‘70s, Jamaica’s most significant cultural export emerged in the genre reggae, led by icons such Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Toots Hibbert and Jimmy Cliff. Despite its growing international significance, the Kingston music scene from which this all emerged was never provided with the resources to make it a cultural tourist attraction. Efforts by the promoters of the famed music festival series Reggae Sunsplash of the 1980s were ignored when they suggested that reggae should be used to promote the island. Jamaica was marketed to the world as a leading tourism destination in the Caribbean, notably for sea, sand, and sunshine, but not a significant contributor to world culture. Journalists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists will query why this is so. We will not explore or offer explanations. Instead, we will posit how Kingston and Jamaica at large must benefit from this uniqueness of its tremendous cultural assets.
7 Genres of Music
Beginning in the 1950s and into the 1960s, Jamaica became known for a new cultural reality, Rastafari, that impacted the society driven by African consciousness with its teachings of peace, love, music, black awareness, and use of ganja (aka) marijuana. Kingston evolved as a musical reckoning after mento/calypso and nyabinghi, followed by five more genres of popular music that captured world attention; ska in the early 1960s, rocksteady in the mid-1960s, reggae emerging straight from rocksteady, dub arising out of the recording studios and sound system culture, and dancehall music in the late 70s.
This is unmatched by any other country. But despite this phenomenon, no Jamaican government, financial institution, entrepreneur, or international cultural agency saw the potential of a world market waiting to be exploited in the best interest of the communities of Kingston. A space that gave the world this popular music culture and lifestyle that has swept the world as a whole for seven decades has not benefitted. Cultural activists have been advocating for using our influential music culture to drive an alternative tourism product based on culture for decades. Still, this advocacy has been ignored by successive administrations and corporate Jamaica.
Parallels with New Orleans
Sounds & Pressure Foundation chairman and his late wife, upon visiting New Orleans in 1996, saw the dynamic similarities of New Orleans and Kingston, size, population, climate, notable crime rate, beautiful natural harbours, strong cultural offerings, but also the considerable dissimilarity: While New Orleans had become a leading tourist attraction in the United States, consistently ranked in the top ten places to be visited for its music, food, people, culture, Kingston (apart from a Japanese inflow of cultural tourists since the 1980s), remained unknown and unvisited despite its strong music culture around the world.
In contrast in 2019 just before the COVID-19 pandemic, New Orleans boasted revenues of (US)$11 billion, over 10 million visitors, and employed more than 50,000 workers in its cultural tourism industry.
Sounds and Pressure Foundation is proposing the development of ties between New Orleans and Kingston, with the Jamaica Tourist Board and the Office of the Mayor of Kingston reaching out to the authorities of New Orleans to have a delegation visit there from Kingston to learn first-hand how New Orleans sustains its cultural tourism vibrancy and wealth.
Kingston and New Orleans are interconnected culturally; the American city had an enormous influence on the birth of Jamaican music, as it was the rhythm & blues emerging from the American south, primarily New Orleans, that inspired the young Jamaican musicians of the 1940s and ‘50s. But interestingly, in an interview carried in the New York Times eulogising the great New Orleans entertainer Professor Longhair one of the pioneers of American rhythm & blues, he admitted that he was influenced by a “Calypso Joe,” an itinerant street musician who journeyed on the “banana boats” that plied between New Orleans and the Caribbean, to entertain New Orleanians. This was later confirmed by another great New Orleans musician Dr. John in an interview of him when he performed at a Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival.
Developing Beat Street
The Sounds & Pressure Foundation is working in conjunction with the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF), the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB), the Ministry of Culture and Entertainment, the Office of the Mayor of Kingston, and the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), and collaborating with Kingston Creative, to establish what it describes as The Beat Street Music Heritage Zone. The area from North Parade to North Street and Luke Lane to Love Lane houses over 16 music heritage sites from which the Jamaica music industry evolved, such as Forrester’s Hall the world’s premier dance hall, Big Yard, early home of reggae sensation Dennis Brown, and housed over 30 record stores, studios and offices from the 1950s to present.
Orange Street was branded “Beat Street” by music industry pioneers such as Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, and Cecil “Prince Buster” Campbell. In particular from west Parade to North Street was home for record producers such as Beverley’s Records, Prince Buster, “Coxsone” Dodd, Bunny “Striker” Lee, Sonia Pottinger, Randy’s Records, Joe Gibbs, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Clancy Eccles, Tom the Great Sebastian, Winston “Niney” Holness, Winston “Techniques” Riley, The Wailers/Tuff Gong, to name just a few.
Island Records founded by Chris Blackwell a Britisher of Jamaican parents, that became one of the most successful independent record companies in the world, originated at the corner of North Street and Orange Street where Beverley’s operated from. The Beat Street district and the community development plan of Sounds & Pressure have the potential to be a real game changer in the efforts to revitalise that specific area that has been plagued with crime and underdevelopment for decades. This is an opportunity for a truly creative city initiative and the development of a heritage tourism product in the heart of the city to benefit the people from these communities.
(Julian “Jingles” Reynolds is a novelist, filmmaker, social entrepreneur, and journalist, who operates in the U.S.A. and Jamaica. Dr. Dennis Howard is an ethnomusicologist, educator, media consultant and entrepreneur. Roy Black is a radio host, music collector, and journalist. They are co-founders along with six others of the Sounds & Pressure Foundation in 2005. )