Recklessly Helping Out in LA

Rekkless Says Charity Begins At Home In the shadow of the Hollywood sign, Rekkless Taylor rap duo "D" and Rekkless Says Charity Begins At Home"Jizzle" donate clothes, food, and in honor of Jizzle's AKA "Oso", teddy bears to those seemingly forgotten sleeping in the streets of downtown LA's skid row. Also involved in benefits for Haiti, the brothers hailing from a Gary Indiana Jackson size family of nine found the number of displaced people resorting to sleeping in the streets in a city known for its wealthy disturbing and unbelievable. "This is not Haiti, but you see people living in tents, sleeping bags and cardboard at night as a last resort, turned away because the available shelters are full and they have nowhere else to go. Most disturbing are the high number of disabled and women sleeping in the streets in a society known for it's wealth. We hope to bring creative solutions by attracting a spotlight to this unbelievable problem." Taylors Do Something About It: Enlist Celebrity Friends, Set to Announce Launch of Extended Solutions "Oso", Spanish for bear and "D.O" decided to play their part by giving what they can to most help those that call downtown streets of LA home. The brothers expect to announce an expansion to their initiatives by enlisting fellow entertainment celebrities that also call Los Angeles home. "D.O", and the large frame of brother " Jizzle", AKA "Oso", matched with a big heart, named teddy bear by fans, can be seen in the downtown night leaving care bears and packages for those asleep, to inspire hope in improving their current living conditions. For interviews, contact: r3kkless@yahoo.com http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=87876483&albumId=2808214

Still a Ways to Go!

His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, 1968
ADDRESS TO THE UNITED NATIONS


Here is our opportunity and our challenge. If the nuclear powers are prepared to declare a truce, let us seize the moment to strengthen the institutions and precedures which will serve as the means for the pacific settlement of disputes among men.

Conflicts between nations will continue to arise. The real issue is whether they are to be resolved by force, or by resort to peaceful methods and procedures, administered by impartial institutions. This very Organization itself is the greatest such institution, and it is in a more powerful United Nations that we seek, and it is here that we shall find, the assurance of a peaceful future.

Were a real and effective disarmament achieved and the funds now spent in the arms race devoted to the amelioration of man's state; were we to concentrate only on the peaceful uses of nuclear knowledge, how vastly and in how short a time might we change the conditions of mankind. This should be our goal.

When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality. and thus, closer to a love of peace.

The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length.

Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does. It is the sacred duty of this Organization to ensure that the dream of equality is finally realized for all men to whom it is still denied, to guarantee that exploitation is not reincarnated in other forms in places whence it has already been banished.

As a free Africa has emerged dunng the past decade, a fresh attack has been launched against exploitation, wherever it still exists. And in that interaction so common to history, this in turn, has stimulated and encouraged the remaining dependent peoples to renewed efforts to throw off the yoke which has oppressed them and its claim as their birthright the twin ideals of liberty and equality. This very struggle is a struggle to establish peace, and until victory is assured, that brotherhood and understanding which nourish and give life to peace can be but partial and incomplete.

In the United States of America, the administration of President Kennedy is leading a vigorous attack to eradicate the remaining vestige of racial discrimination from this country. We know that this conflict will be won and that right will triumph. In this time of trial, these efforts should be encouraged and assisted, and we should lend our sympathy and support to the American Government today.

Last May, in Addis Ababa, I convened a meeting of Heads of African States and Governments. In three days, the thirty-two nations represented at that Conference demonstrated to the world that when the will and the determination exist, nations and peoples of diverse backgrounds can and will work together. in unity, to the achievement of common goals and the assurance of that equality and brotherhood which we desire.

On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson:

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned:

That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation;

That until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes;

That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;

That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained;

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Afnca in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed;

Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will;

Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven;

Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.

The United Nations has done much, both directly and indirectly to speed the disappearance of discrimination and oppression from the earth. Without the opportunity to focus world opinion on Afnca and Asia which this Organization provides, the goal, for many, might still lie ahead, and the struggle would have taken far longer. For this, we are truly grateful.

But more can be done. The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome. In pursuance of resolutions adopted at the Addis Ababa Summit Conference, African States have undertaken certain measures in the economic field which, if adopted by all member states of the United Nations, would soon reduce intransigence to reason. I ask, today, for adherence to these measures by every nation represented here which is truly devoted to the principles enunciated in the Charter.

I do not believe that Portugal and South Africa are prepared to commit economic or physical suicide if honourable and reasonable alternatives exist. I believe that such alternatives can be found. But I also know that unless peaceful solutions are devised, counsels of moderation and temperance will avail for naught; and another blow will have been dealt to this Organization which will hamper and weaken still further its usefulness in the struggle to ensure the victory of peace and liberty over the forces of strife and oppression. Here, then, is the opportunity presented to us. We must act while we can, while the occasion exists to exert those legitimate pressures available to us, lest time run out and resort be had to less happy means.


Words of Haile Selassie I

SKA ROCKSTEADY REGGAE: History of REGGAE Music Pt 3

Part Two: SKA ROCKSTEADY REGGAE

Ska's large brass ensembles gave way to smaller groups and the debt to American Soul music became greater as Ska morphed into Rocksteady. Vocals came to the fore, and the tempo slowed; perhaps, as local folklore says, because the especially hot summer of 1966 led dancers to call for slower songs. Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield's Impressions were almost godlike in their influence. Many younger artists, like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Toots Hibbert, made their first recordings dur­ing the Ska era, but only came into their own with Rocksteady.

Rocksteady was over almost before it began, but its artistic flowering produced many great records in a com­pressed time span. By 1968, Rocksteady was giving way to Reggae, but pinpointing the first Reggae record is no easier than pinpointing the first Ska or Rocksteady record. Unlike its predeces­sors, Reggae owed little to Fats Domino, the Impressions, or any American music. It was the heartbeat of an island just seventeen degrees from the equator, and it was the sound of country come to town. "Ivan Martin," played by Jimmy Cliff in the film The Harder They Come, was. the quintessential country boy adrift in Kingston 's mean streets. "Until Reggae," said producer lee Perry, who was himself from the country, "it was all Kingston , Kingston , Kingston . Then the country people come to town and they bring the earth, the trees, the mountains. That's when Reggae music come back to the earth."

Rocksteady, like Soul music, had the commercial discipline of white pop music, but Reggae rejected that discipline, and its retrieval of the Africanness in Afro-Caribbean music went hand-in­hand with the rise of Rastafari. The Burrus, who'd lived communally in Jamaica since slavery and held fast to their African roots, shared housing in the low-rent west Kingston district of Dungle with the Rastafarians, who believed that a black king would be crowned in Africa and lead the lost tribes out of Babylon . The music, the beliefs, and the dress of the Rastas influenced the sound, the spiritual agenda, and the look of Reggae.

The music played out against a disinte­grating social backdrop. Jamaica had become independent from Great Britain in 1962, but, as the promise of Independence faded, Reggae became politicized and angry. By the time this set closes in 1975, the music was past making compromises with the tourist trade and long past hoping to get on American radio.

The Trojan Records collection "Dawning of a New Era" chronicles a time during the late 60's when Ska, Rock Steady and Reggae were all blending and evolving, drawing in new fans worldwide. The 2-disc set pulls together prime records from 1968-69, a period when Skinheads were still largely an underground youth movement and not a violent newspaper headline.

The great thing about this set of tracks is you don't get stuck with more copies of Desmond Dekker's hits but rather, you get rare and in demand records. Many of the tracks on this set have never been issued since their original small pressings nearly thirty-five years ago. And with artists of the caliber of Rico Rodriquez, Lloyd Charmers, The Tennors, Lester Sterling, the Ethiopians and Tommy McCook featured, this collection is a great addition to your collection if you like Ska and the Skinhead sound.

The Skinheads were a youth movement that sprang up from the working class youth in Britain. They were seasoned with some angst that came from tough neighborhoods and they choose the Ska beat and Reggae sounds coming out of the West Indies and Black neighborhoods as their own. The beat suited their aggressive and sometimes angry attitude and here are the roots of bands like The Clash and punk rock. The Skinhead interest in Reggae in particular pushed the music into the awareness of the public at large and helped many Reggae artists break into the Pop charts in England. The Skinhead Movement only lasted about four years but it was an important key to mainstream success for Reggae Music.

Much of this "history" is included in the notes for "This is Reggae Music: The Golden Era 1960-1975" - a four CD set that provides a great musical overview of the genre - the selections and sound quality are excellent through out - a vital Ras John Reggae.com Pick! From the booklet included with the four CD box set, "This Is Reggae Music: The Golden Era" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00064LOV4?tag=sistamaureesrast&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B00064LOV4&adid=1PDH24Y48547AAWJJB4H&)

An IRIE REGGAE Lifestyle

REGGAE.com’s slogan for several years has been “Get a Hit of PositiVibes at REGGAE.com”. That slogan and basic theme sets the tone for what we will call the REGGAE Lifestyle. The mission is one of promoting the unity of all peoples with a message of peace and love combined with a realization that all is not right with the world but with belief in the power of Jah Spirit to lift us up and determination, all challenges can be set asunder! The words and music of Bob Marley and other REGGAE and World Music artists continue to inspire and raise people up in Spirit and consciousness. This “One Love” philosophy is central to the site as an editorial and content direction. Because this powerful Spirit has been so intertwined with REGGAE Music, the music has transcended race, creed and culture. From Jamaica to Japan and Ethiopia to all parts of Europe… anywhere you go, you can expect to hear the vital vibrations of REGGAE Music as it spreads upful and bright feelings like a warm glow from a tropical sunset. The music has come to be connected with good times and good feelings of people coming together in a celebration of life. It’s a REGGAE Lifestyle.

How did this REGGAE Lifestyle come to be? REGGAE Music was born in the concrete jungle of the Kingston, Jamaica slums at the same time that there was a dramatic explosion of creativity in Rock Music, other music and culture during the 60’s. With songs like The Wailers “Get Up Stand Up”, REGGAE Music quickly became a cornerstone of the rallying cry for a whole generation of teenagers and young adults moving toward the more humanistic, anti-racist, anti-establishment lifestyle that grew out of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Reggae Music emerged as a major force in modern culture with films like “The Harder They Come”, the early top hits like Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” and then the emergence of Bob Marley to the world stage in the early 1970’s. The generation that followed the pot smoking Woodstock Nation with urban street smart Punk Rockers found just as much for them as the previous generation had in the powerful lyrics and rhythms of a music that had grown out of the ghetto. A new generation of fans was conquered. Today REGGAE Music’s influence has penetrated every corner of the globe and Bob Marley is one of the most recognizable people ever to inhabit the planet. TIME Magazine picked Bob Marley’s EXODUS album as The Album of the 20th Century. Today as for the last thirty plus years, REGGAE Music is the soundtrack for college dorm rooms, backyard barbecues, pool parties and laid back clubs and bars from Tokyo to the tropics. It’s more than MUSIC, it’s a LIFESTYLE.

REGGAE.com and REGGAE mobile embrace the REGGAE Lifestyle and will be reflecting its many aspects from music and videos to exotic and fun travel adventures… Meet and Greet Artist Special Packages, Ras John Excursion Videos (short videos featuring clubs, beaches, hotels and music snippets from around the world – send us your photos, articles and short videos for us to feature), we’ll have an International calendar of events, lots to come and lots of fun – Everything Tropical, Upful and Bright supporting a positive, compassionate and IRIE partying world. Reggae.com is the #1 Reggae Music website averaging over 150,000 hits daily. It is your link to vital vibes, exotic destinations, cultural insight and you will always find streaming audio to give you the prefect soundtrack for vacations, parties and everyday good times. – One Love Mon!

Day-O: History of Reggae Pt. 1

The following is from the booklet included with the box set, "This Is Reggae Music: The Golden Era" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00064LOV4?tag=sistamaureesrast&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B00064LOV4&adid=1PDH24Y48547AAWJJB4H&)

Nineteen-fifty-seven. The United States was in the grip of Calypsomania. and some were even going so far as. to predict that the calypso would soon eclipse Rock n’ Roll. Before it all blew over, Robert Mitchum, Maya Angelou the Norman Luboff Choir, and many others had made Calypso albums. Calypso, of course, was Trinidadian, but the two big Calypso era hits, "Banana Boat Song” and "Jamaican Farewell," were Jamaican; so Calypso was reckoned to come from Jamaica.

As the craze subsided, a Billboard magazine reporter sniffed out a free vacation and went to Kingston to see what the Jamaicans liked. To his surprise, it was rare R&B; not Calypso. "Local observers,” he wrote, "note that the local musical product is developing into a hybrid in which the strongest elements are calypso and rock & roll.” Understandably, the writer missed the pan-African underground springing up in Kingston’s slums, but ten years later pan-Africanism would merge with American R&B and Caribbean music in those same back alleys to forever change global music.
Around 1960, Ska evolved from Jamaican R&B. The Billboard article mentioned that Fats Domino was the most in demand artist on the island, so it was probably no coincidence that Ska arrived on the heels of three influential American releases: Fats Domino's "Be My Guest" (1959), Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City" (also 1959), and Rosco Gordon's "Surely I Love You" (1960). All three worked the offbeat for all it was worth. Bill Black's Combo figured some­where in the equation, too. Black's greasy instrumental hits featured a hugely upfront four-to-the-bar beat, and sold so well in Jamaica that he toured there - to the surprise of many who found out that he was white.

It's axiomatic that there are no facts in Jamaica , only opinions, so no one knows what "Ska" means and no one agrees on what was the first Ska record. But around 1960, Jamaican drummers began hitting the second and fourth beats in unison with the piano and guitar, while the bass played walking quarter-notes. That was Ska. Local musicians called it "Upside-down R&B." It had an under­ground following in England, but not in the United States. One giant Ska hit, Millie's "My Boy Lollipop," rode into the charts on the back of the British Invasion, and when it exited, Ska exited along with it.

'Whatever was happening in Jamaica didn't go away when Millie hit the remainder bins. The local industry was building inexorably. The 1951 Billboard article mentioned that there was just one record press on the island (not one pressing plant, but one press) although local entrepreneur Ken Khouri claimed to have two presses running by 1954· Around 1957; Khouri built a studio, and Dada Tawari opened the Caribbean Record Company with mastering facilities. From that point, the Jamaican industry was self-sufficient, albeit geared toward faux calypso LP’s for tourists.

"Alongside the tiny manufacturing industry, there were open-air deejays known as sound systems. “A cliff face of speaker boxes, each big enough to raise a family in, powered by amplification of intercontinental capability," is the way journalist Lloyd Bradley described them. There was life-and-death competition among the system operators to source the rarest American R&B and the best technology.

The systems were essential to the dissemination of music because the island’s two radio stations, RJR (launched in 1950 as a branch of British Rediffusion) and the government's JBC (which started in 1959), played it as safe as the BBC mothership; The payoff for the sound system operators, came in prestige and drink sales. Three sound system men ruled the early Sixties: Duke Reid, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Prince Buster. Both Reid and Dodd began operating from family liquor stores. The idea of producing records occurred first to Reid, who cut some instrumentals at Khouri's studio circa 1957. Around the same time, Dodd realized that Jamaicans didn't like rock 'n' roll, and began recording the kind of R&B that the Americans were no longer producing. In 1958, Chris Blackwell launched R&B Records (the precursor of Island ) and future Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga launched WIRL (West Indies Records Ltd.).

From the booklet included with the four CD box set, "This Is Reggae Music: The Golden Era" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00064LOV4?tag=sistamaureesrast&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B00064LOV4&adid=1PDH24Y48547AAWJJB4H&)

A Hit of PositiVibes - A Meditation

A Daily Meditation Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where their is sadness, joy; O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console, To be understood as to understand, To be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; It is in dying [to self] that we are born to eternal life. Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi From Eknath Easwaran's very excellent book Meditation: Commonsense Directions for an Uncommon Life (Nilgiri Press)...

Third World Still Going STRONG!

New York, New York - March 11th: On March 2nd, 2010 Third World was nominated for an International Reggae and World Music Award (IRAWMA) in the category for Most Outstanding ShowBand/Group. This is IRAWMA's 29th staging and is produced yearly by Martin's International & Associates. "The primary objective of Martin's International & Associates is to promote reggae and world beat music as an art form and, each year, honor entertainers and others associated with world music for their contributions to the industry and to humanity internationally. IRAWMA is a vehicle of expression for the voiceless peoples of the world. More than 20 million fans viewed the 26th, 27th, and 28th IRAWMA on television."

When asked about the nomination, band member Richard "Rugs" Daley responded, "To respond by saying we are enthused would be an understatement. We have been so well received since announcing our 35th Anniversary Celebration tour and now this. It is just such an honor to be recognized. It makes doing what we do that much more rewarding." The nomination comes on the heels of the band's 35th Anniversary celebration which commenced with a performance on January 30, 2010 at Turn-Key Productions 14th staging of Jamaica Jazz and Blues festival. The band will celebrate their milestone anniversary with a tour that will take them to Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, the United States and Caribbean.

In addition, the band will release their upcoming album "Patriot" featuring artists such as Damian Marley, Stephen Marley, Dean Frazier, Junior Reid, Marcia Griffith, Tessanne Chin, Michael Rose, Taurus Riley, and Toots.

One of the longest running Reggae band - Third World is an institution that produces and performs music that is cutting edge, positive, progressive and internationally relevant. Formed in 1973, the group has released a total of 22 albums as well as solo projects from Lead Singer Bunny Rugs and Guitarist Cat Coore. This does not include their new unreleased album entitled "Patriots" which will be released in early 2010. They have received numerous awards, including an Award in 2009 from Brooklyn Academy of Music ("BAM"), the 1986 "United Nations Peace Medal," 1992 and 1996 Jamaica Music Industry Awards for Best Show Band and 10 Grammy nominations. Additionally, the group has worked and collaborated with top acts such as the Jackson Five, Bob Marley and The Wailers and Stevie Wonder.

For management and bookings, please contact Victor Lewis of VicRae Inc. by calling 347-216-6885 (USA), 876-582-3970 (Jamaica), Skype: vicraeinc or email vicraeinc@gmail.com. For media inquiries, please contact Triple 7 Entertainment LLC by calling 201-981-6960 (USA), 876-475-5841 (Jamaica) or email media@triple7entllc.com

Rough on the Surface

It really hits you when you have spent a few weeks traveling and enjoying the beauty of this world to come back to ordinary reality. By ordinary reality I don't mean what is really real, just what most everyone thinks is real. Tossed and turned by the wind, waves, current and storms constantly churning at the surface of the sea.

Some people have big powerful ships that insulate them from all but the big storms. Others have less bold and brash boats but still travel in reasonable comfort and assurance of getting through the day without drownling. Saddly, a lot of people float around in small, fragile boats and all too many cling to life rafts just trying to stay afloat.

Then there are the ones not dependent on the size or power of the boat - they have become master seamen who are one with the sea and neither fight or embrace it - they just live it moment by moment anticipating the changing forces and accepting each storm as a test of skill and joyfully soak in the energy of the bright sunny days with equal involvement.

You can extend the metaphor in all directions and you will still find the parallels and maybe some insights into life at the surface of life. You are at the helm of your ship - plot a bold and life embrassing course!

The surface is only a very small part of what is here of course.

checking in

Have decided to get into blogging a bit more. Who's out there?
Who's reading? Who knows. But REGGAE.com gets a few million hits a week so, maybe you jumped over to the BLOG to check it out.

The last piece was on Obama winning the election. That was a year ago. Still lots of hope but inevitably reality has set in and you realize that no matter how much people want to change, change is hard and usually slow. We live in a "want it now" world where people have forgotten that patience is a virtue.

Some things seem very clear. We need to really get going with alternative energy and stop burning oil. Coal we have got to keep away from - it's dirty and dangerous and more destructive to the environment than oil by a long shot. We should really go for bio-diesel - recycling cooking oil to fuel buses and trucks - there's a good idea. Wind, solar - every roof in sunny climates should have some solar cells and we should be able to sell electricity back to the power companies as easily as buying it.

Health Care - no brainer that we need to do something! What? That's the hard part. There are so many options and it is a huge capitalist industry - not saying that is bad in and of itself but it seems to have lost a focus on taking care of people and only is focused on profits. There has got to be some balance. Provider costs are out of control, insurance costs are out of control and legal costs are out of control. It is a vicious cycle. If we can get a health care bill that fixes some of the problems without creating too many new ones ... guess we will have to see what happens and hope for the best.

The World is always full of change and energy pushing and pulling. Just returned from a stay with friends in Maui. The pace is slower than is possible in S. Florida to say the least. There are many very pretty vistas in FL but nothing compared to the grandeur of the beauty in the Hawaiian Islands. In FL for a while but heading back to the club soon where we can make our own riddum on a quiet stream a little removed from the torrential flow of the river of humanity.

Jah Bless and Guide,
One Love, Ras John

Finally the election is over!

Best part is, for the most part, things seem to have worked out very positively. Obviously there are millions of people who are not so sure. I believe that four years from now, most of them will be able to say things worked out reasonably well. It is not going to be easy though, no matter how talented a group of people President Obama surrounds himself with. And we are all going to have to make some sacrifices too. Let's start putting the fear mentality and division behind us and get the CHANGE to a brighter, more compassionate and prosperous new day going!
JB - webmaster REGGAE.com

Take the reggae ride: Album a journey through reggae, roots and ska

By Lucas Peerman Pulse Editor

This CD will reinvent your idea of what you thought reggae and ska 'should' sound like by exposing you to the next evolution of creativity within the genre. All of these artists have taken ideas based on ska and reggae, and combined them with their own love of hip-hop, Latin, roots and rock music.

With the above statement, producer John-Michael Vasquez describes his latest project, "Reggaenomics 101," a compilation of 14 reggae-esque songs from artists from around the country.

Five artists featured on the album will perform at CD release parties today in El Paso, Friday in Las Cruces and Saturday in Albuquerque.

"This album is another way for these artists to spread their music. The CD release parties, really, were an excuse just for us to get together," said Vasquez, the saxophone player for local band Liquid Cheese, which will perform at the parties. Other bands performing here and in El Paso are Radio La Chusma (El Paso), Fighting Chance (San Luis Obispo, Calif.), Over the Line (Las Vegas) and Warsaw Poland Bros. (Phoenix).

Liquid Cheese, a seven-member reggae/ska/Latin band with a complete horn section, has shared a stage with each of the bands featured on "Reggaenomics 101." From Shakedown (Sacramento, Calif.) to Soapbox Paradox (East Lansing, Mich.) to B.P.M. (Montgomery, Ala.), the album isn't only a tribute to great music, but an indication of how many miles Liquid Cheese has put on its traveling school bus.

Silence isn't an option on the bus as the sound system is always in use. Many times, the music coming through is from fellow reggae bands, which ultimately was the inspiration for "Reggaenomics 101."

"(The songs) are from the CDs that we listen to on the bus. These are the songs on our iPods," Vasquez said.

Some of the songs have a guitar-laden rock feel ("Love to Get Love" from Shakedown). Some go for an old-school Marley vibe ("Robin Hood" from B.P.M.). Others incorporate a DJ for a hip-hop sound ("La Junta" from La Junta). And one band even offers an acoustic organ solo ("Enjoy" from Over The Line).

Besides a focus on the upbeat (an element of reggae/ska), "what all these songs have in common is there's no genre to put them in," Vasquez said.

The album, which took about two years to produce, does feature six New Mexico bands, including Las Cruces band No Regrets and Danny Winn and the Earthlings from Albuquerque.
"Reggaenomics 101" will be available online at iTunes and other music-downloading services, as well as 2,400 stores around the country, Vasquez said.

Bands will also take copies of the album with them on tour to sell around the country. That way, every band on the CD will get their sound out to reggae fans across the country.

"We want to put the music into people's hands who might not have heard these bands otherwise," Vasquez said.

Lucas Peerman can be reached at lpeerman@lcsun-news.com

Reggae Rebellion

By Patrick S. Pemberton
ppemberton@thetribunenews.com

Selwyn Brown, left, and David Hinds have been part of Steel Pulse from the beginning. The reggae veterans will perform at The Graduate in San Luis Obispo on Monday.
When The Police added reggae rhythms to songs like “I Can’t Stand Losing You” or “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” chances are they were fusing a little Steel Pulse into their music.
Back in the ’70s, The Police opened for Steel Pulse, a British reggae act that curiously found its initial audience among punk rock fans.

While Steel Pulse didn’t blend punk, rock and reggae as blatantly as The Police, they clearly related to the punks.

“A common factor was that we were both against what the system was about, politically and socially,” said David Hinds, lead singer of the band since its inception in 1975.
Steel Pulse has always fought the system, whether recording songs about injustice or suing a New York City cab service for discrimination. (The class action suit is still pending, Hinds says.)
“It’s nothing contrived or anything like that,” Hinds said. “We just see the world as it is and we just sort of point out what’s going wrong.”

When the band started out, it couldn’t land gigs in the Caribbean because of its Rastafarian beliefs, so it gravitated toward punkers, touring with acts like The Clash, Generation X and XTC.
Songs like “Ku Klux Klan,” “Not King James Version” and “Taxi Driver” (inspired by their lawsuit) typify the band’s politically-charged lyrics. To add impact to their songs, the band is known for wearing costumes — like Klan robes – during their shows.

The band’s most recent album, “African Holocaust,” featured roots reggae paired with lyrics about global warming, war and race.

Hinds spoke to The Tribune about punk, Klan robes and Bob Marley from a hotel in Kansas City, Mo.
Q: How did the audiences react to reggae when you did a punk show?
A: They reacted in a positive way. The positivity sort of backfired from time to time, where they sort of more than appreciated it. They started spitting and throwing beer on the stage, which is their way of saying, “Yeah, we totally approve of what you’re doing.”
Q: The Police obviously have a reggae influence. What do you think of their reggae sound?
A: I thought reggae needed more of a contemporary kind of groove to it. It was a bit too laid-back to move forward amongst the other music in the scheme of things. I think after a couple of hits from Bob Marley and certain bands that had pace in their music, like The Police, reggae started to realize that it had to step up the beat on the tracks. The Police is one of the bands that, to me, contributed a certain energy to reggae music. And I always appreciated the lyrical content of The Police.
Q: I read somewhere that back in the Island Records days, you were pressured to become more commercial. I think there’s even one story where you guys were asked to be more like Eddy Grant.
A: That was asked of us as well when we in the middle of recording the “Earth Crisis” album. But when the album got released, the company changed its tune for a while.
Q: What did they say?
A: During that period of time Eddy Grant was in New York, getting a lot of positive publicity and write-ups, so they were getting a bit nervous about Eddy coming back to town and making things happen. We were a different band with a different approach, and we had a different image than Eddy Grant. But they weren’t aware of that because larger companies cannot see this and the actual ins and outs of the music other than looking at statistics. As you know, Eddy Grant, although he’s still producing music out there, did not have the same longevity that we had. No disrespect to Eddy — he’s an excellent musician in his own right. ... But at the end of the day, it’s perseverance, and we persevered.
Q: How did you guys have to compromise through the years?
A: We started to dilute the lyrics somewhat and also the grooves behind the lyrics. So instead of writing an album with 10 political songs, you sort of write an album with seven political songs, and then three poppy-sounding ones. You tried to match what was going on, realizing that after the death of Marley that reggae music was losing its popularity. So we started trying to get a bit of funk or R&B kind of sound into what we were doing. It backfired more than it benefited us.
Q: Some people didn’t like that?
A: Our hard-core fans weren’t too appreciative of it. We lost an audience for quite a while.
Q: Do you still dress in the Klan robes?
A: You know something, we don’t, but I’m thinking it’s about time that we do that now because I’ve been watching the news since I’ve been in the U.S. about the Klan on the rise again.
Q: Did it conjure up any feelings when you had those guys in the robes onstage?
A: The whole idea when we started that was to be thought-provocative — to be very controversial. We thought instead of just singing this s---, why don’t we act it out? We did that with so many things. I used to come on the stage dressed in a prison uniform with a ball and chain on my legs.
Q: When you think of reggae, Bob Marley is obviously at the top of the hierarchy. Is it kind of hard to get away from the shadow that he cast?
A: It’s hard, but who wants to get away from that shadow? I don’t want to get away from that shadow. Mike Tyson was always in the shadow of the greats, like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali and all those guys, and he’s probably got an attitude about that. But when I look at the world of Bob Marley and what he stood for and the amount of people he reached with the music and how he came from the same background as I did and my parents did (his parents were Jamaican), and had a similar struggle to get his music exposed, it’s an honor to be under the shadow of Bob Marley. I like to believe we’re still catching up, so it gives me incentive to keep going.
Q: How did a British reggae band wind up performing at the White House for the 1993 inauguration festivities?
A: That’s a good question. You’re gonna have to ask the man who hosted “An Inconvenient Truth.” It was his idea, really. Al Gore was an admirer of Steel Pulse music back in the day.
Who knows — maybe if Hillary wins it, we’ll get out there again.
Reach Patrick S. Pemberton at 781-7903.

Uganda: Celebrating Bob Marley's Birthday

February 11, 2007Posted to the web February 12, 2007
Kampala

THE Tuff Gong reggae theme night at Ange Noir discotheque has not only made one year, but also a mark as the biggest reggae night on the entertainment scene. Jamaica and the UK bowed down and came to Kampala last Saturday to celebrate the Tuff Gong night.
And since Bob Marley is credited to be the father of reggae music, icon of Rastafarianism, prophet and angel of life, his music took centre stage.

And what comes off better than a collection of internationally recognised reggae artistes from Jamaica and the UK playing Bob Marley's music? Aswald's Brinsley Holns passionately mastered the lyrics and vocals to the mark and when he nearly lost his voice after singing 12 songs, it was not a surprise. The biggest surprise was when an excited Jamaican reggae veteran, Matic Holns' Henry "Buttons" Tenyue, blew the trombone during the Jeckaki band session, cementing the "one love" reggae theme.

For the uninitiated, there were lessons to learn. Like what to reply when someone says "Jah!" and how to chorus "Yes Rasta!" The ladies, who turned up in the bright Rastafarian colours, red, green and yellow, were optic nutrition.

The dancehall duo of Peter Miles and Mesha were explosive. And Bebe Cool's Pan-Africanism was noticed when he performed his new song, In Prison for no reason, that echoes the trials of African great men like Nelson Mandela.

2006 Reggae Grammy Winner Ziggy Marley - Citizen of Earth

Michael A Edwards - Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Grammy winner Ziggy Marley

As happy as he is about the result, Ziggy Marley is n't all that hung up on the Grammys or on awards in general.

"I try not to get excited or put too much emphasis on the whole award ting," he said, speaking by phone to the Observer in the wake of his announcement as the winner of what for many is still music's cherished recognition.

"If people ask, is Love Is My Religion that win the Grammy. This give me another platform to get the message out, that's what is most important" he said, in reference to the title of the album and the lead-off single, a modest hit. And what exactly is the message?

"I'm really trying to make an evolution within the song, within the music to try to get us to being better people. If you really check it, the concept of God was never meant to divide people. Its really been about love from the beginning, that is what I read in the Bible and what Yeshua teach - love one another."

As even the Grammy winner will acknowledge, love another is a hard sell in an era increasingly fraught with conflicts motivated by divergent religious beliefs. "Yeah," he says. "It a get worse."
Initially hesitant, Ziggy offers this perspective on why inter-faith conflicts now seems intractable. "Well is generation after generation keep educating their children the wrong way, everybody pushing their own political view of the thing under the guise of religion and keep people divided. It jus keep the passin' on from one to the next, and each generation it get worse."

There are, of course, other things to reflect on, and one of the album's other interesting tunes, On A Beach In Hawaii, (writtenon an actual visit to the Pacific island group some years ago), provides a neat vehicle for introspection. Against a somewhat plaintively strummed guitar, he manages to pull past, present and future together, reflecting on what it means to be a Marley and the inherent tension that poses vis-a-viz the search for a personal identity. "Is really a love song," he says, in an almost self-deprecatory manner, " but it have a whole heap a different layers to it."

Ziggy Marley confides that such distance from his native land is not merely welcome but occasionally necessary. "Even though I born in Jamaica, and I love Jamaica, still, it's good to experience Earth, because that's the one thing we all have in common, we are from Earth. So, as a human being and as an artiste, it's part of my journey and my development."
The journey takes him next to China, virgin territory in more than one respect. "It's my first trip. I know the people and I know about the culture, but this is my first time actually going there and that's the thing that really excite me - being able to get dis message to a lot of different people."

And a timely trip it is, as only recently Universal Music China (As reported in the Sunday Observer, February 11), is making a significant promotional push behind a Chinese-language verison of Legend, the disc that cemented his father's standing as a global icon, though the same reports have it that the name Bob Marley has little cachet-as yet-among the average Chinese.
It is, however, recognised by Grammy voters. This win marks the third time in five years that a Marley scion has taken the Reggae Grammy, and with brother Stephen's solo debut, Mind Control, now on the streets, there could well be a repeat next year. Dynasty? As he said, Ziggy's not too hung up on awards, but the win does beg the question, "Does he believe that the panel chose his album based on his lineage?

"Listen to the music," he answers, " and then you can judge for yourself."

And the 2007 Winner is ZIGGY MARLEY – Love is My Religion.

Reggae Grammy Winners - Best Reggae Album Grammy

Reggae Grammy Nominees for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards
A diverse selection of artists were nominated for the music industry's most highly coveted award. A 3 time award winner (nominated as a solo artist for the first time), a controversial artist allegedly black-listed from the industry, a Hasidic Jew, a British reggae band gainfully employed as one of reggae most successful groups named afer an unemployment form and a pair of twins (riddim twins that is) were selected by the National Academy of Recording Sciences (NARAS) as nominees for the Best Reggae Album (Vocal or Instrumental) award. The Awards show airs Feb. 11th, 2007.

The illusive Soca Grammy didn't make it into the categories for 2007 however Haitian superstar Wyclef Jean and Latina diva Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" were nominated for the "Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals" award. Busta Ryhmes an American-born rapper of Jamaican heritage is nominated for the "Best Rap Solo Performance" category.

The 2007 Nominees were:
o Too Bad - Buju Banton [Gargamel Music, Inc.]
o Love Is My Religion - Ziggy Marley [Tuff Gong Worldwide] - WINNER
o Youth - Matisyahu [Epic/Or/JDub]
o Rhythm Doubles - Sly & Robbie [Taxi Records]
o Who You Fighting For - UB40 [Rhino Entertainment]

Past Winners
Year Artist - Album
2005 Damian Marley (2 Awards)
*also won "Best Urban/Alternative Performance" Welcome To Jamrock

2004 Toots and The Maytals - True Love
2003 Sean Paul - Dutty Rock
2002 Lee "Scratch" Perry - Jamaican E.T.
2001 Damian Marley - Halfway Tree
2000 Beenie Man - Art And Life
1999 Burning Spear - Calling Rastafari
1998 Sly And Robbie - Friends
1997 Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers - Fallen Is Babylon
1996 Bunny Wailer - A Tribute To Bob Marley's 50th Anniversary
1995 Shaggy - Boombastic
1994 Bunny Wailer - Crucial! Roots Classics
1993 Inner Circle - Bad Boys
1992 Shabba Ranks - X-tra Naked
1991 Shabba Ranks - As Raw As Ever
1990 Bunny Wailer - A Tribute To Bob Marley
1989 Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers - One Bright Day
1988 Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers - Conscious Party
1987 Peter Tosh - No Nuclear War
1986 Steel Pulse - Babylon The Bandit
1985 Jimmy Cliff - Cliff Hanger
1984 Black Uhuru - Anthem

Hawaiian Music Star, Maker of Hybrid Hits, Seeks a Bigger Stage Beyond Waikiki

February 7, 2007

By NATE CHINEN
HONOLULU — Henry Kapono spends most Sunday afternoons here, on the beachfront patio of Duke’s Waikiki restaurant at the Outrigger Waikiki hotel. His standing engagement has become something of an island institution over the years. It’s a bar gig, maybe not what you might expect from a Hawaiian music veteran of Mr. Kapono’s stature. But he throws himself into it nonetheless, routinely playing for two hours without a break, to stoke the fires of a dancing-and-drinking crowd.

During one recent show a catamaran bobbed in the surf behind Mr. Kapono as he segued from “I Can See Clearly Now,” the reggae war horse by Johnny Nash, to “Every Day in the Islands,” one of his own hybrid Jawaiian (a mixture of Jamaican and Hawaiian) tunes. His four-piece band was crisp. The festive scene was typical, and true to the image Mr. Kapono paints in a song called “Duke’s on Sunday,” which Jimmy Buffett borrowed as a closer for his last album.

But you won’t find Mr. Kapono at Duke’s on Feb. 11, because he’ll be in Los Angeles for the 49th Grammy Awards. He is among the nominees for best Hawaiian music album, for “The Wild Hawaiian” (Eclectic), which somehow represents both the most traditional and the most radical work of his career. Whether you regard him as a front-runner or as a long shot depends partly on your definition of Hawaiian music, a controversial issue ever since the category was established a few years ago.

“The Wild Hawaiian” is a Hawaiian rock album. More specifically, it’s an album of songs in the Hawaiian language, against a whiplash of percussion and distorted guitars. At times, its sound suggests Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana, artists Mr. Kapono often covers at his Sunday gig. Lyrically, it reaches further back: in some cases, to venerable Hawaiian chants. Not surprisingly, its release last year caused a bit of a stir.

“The Hawaiians were taken aback when they first heard it,” said Alaka’i Paleka, the program director and morning host of KPOA (93.5 FM), a Maui radio station that has three tracks from the album in rotation. “It was rocking some songs that weren’t rocked before. The response — it was shock.” Using the Hawaiian term for elder, she continued, “Some of the kupunas were not happy with the style.”

Over lunch at Duke’s with his wife and manager, Lezlee Ka’aihue, and their 6-month-old twins, Mr. Kapono, 58, described the album in less controversial terms: as a cultural outreach and the result of personal introspection.

“My mom and dad spoke fluent Hawaiian; they were both pure Hawaiians,” he said, recalling his upbringing as Henry Ka’aihue. (Kapono is his middle name.) “But they would never speak it to us. When they were growing up, they were forbidden to speak the language, and punished for it. So they never taught us the language. That was the case for my generation.”

Mr. Kapono is a product of the 1960s, though it was in the ’70s that his career took flight, when he teamed up with Cecilio Rodriguez, a fellow guitarist and singer. As Cecilio and Kapono, the duo made a string of breezy acoustic pop albums that resonated deeply at home and beyond, though perhaps not as well nationally as Columbia Records would have liked. (“They didn’t know what to do with C & K,” Mr. Kapono said of the label. “We were two brown-skinned guys with long hair singing contemporary music.”)

Cecilio and Kapono were Hawaii’s answer to Simon and Garfunkel, though it’s important to note that they too sang in English. Many of the duo’s best-loved songs — originals like “Friends” and “Sailing,” as well as covers like “All in Love Is Fair,” by Stevie Wonder — qualify as Hawaiian music only on a technicality. But for several generations of listeners, those songs embody the sound of Hawaii, at least in part.

After the breakup of C & K in the early 1980s, Mr. Kapono embarked on a successful solo career. About a decade ago he set out to make his first Hawaiian-language album, using traditional instrumentation. “I did a recording,” he said, “and when I listened back, it was missing something. It just didn’t have that power.”

He shelved the idea to focus on other projects, including Kapono’s, a restaurant and club that opened in 2001 and closed early last year. Along the way, he began playing the electric guitar for the first time since high school, and something clicked.

Motivated by the desire to carry Hawaiian culture to a new generation, Mr. Kapono conceived of “The Wild Hawaiian.” The risk of being misunderstood was clear.

“This is something so new and so different that if there’s any repercussions, the only guy they’re going to point to is me,” he said. “So I put a lot of thought into doing this. I’m real proud of it. It’s made me really learn more about myself as a Hawaiian and as a human being.”

Asked to elaborate, he pointed to lessons inherent in the songs: “Na Ali’i,” the chant that opens the album, preaches respect, while “He’eia,” another chant, conveys passion. The rest of the songs have given attributes, right up through “Ke Aloha O Ka Haku,” a song of prayerful forbearance that Queen Lili’uokalani composed in 1895 while she was imprisoned at Iolani Palace after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

“Once I got to that point,” Mr. Kapono said, “I realized that this whole album is about moving forward.”

Of course moving forward means different things to different people, Grammy voters included. When the Hawaiian music category was introduced in 2005, after more than a decade of intense lobbying by local factions, the nominee list included legends like the Brothers Cazimero and Keali’i Reichel, both perennial favorites at the Na Hoku Hanohano Awards, Hawaii’s version of the Grammys.

But the 2005 Grammy went to “Slack Key Guitar Volume 2” (Palm), a compilation devoted to the acoustic style with nonstandard guitar tuning that originated in the islands. It was a safe, bland choice, and it set a precedent. In 2006 four of the five nominees were slack key albums; this year three such albums are in the running, along with “The Wild Hawaiian” and a strong traditional offering by the singer Amy Hanaiali’i.

If Mr. Kapono wins, it will signal a reconsideration of what constitutes authenticity in Hawaiian music. Not because he plugged in — the electric guitar has its origins in Hawaiian music, after all — but because he cross-pollinated cultures with such panache.

The album has been noticed for that very reason, just as Mr. Kapono had hoped. On Saturday, before he heads to Los Angeles, he is scheduled to perform “Na Ali’i” on the Pro Bowl halftime show, which has been given the theme of “Wild Hawaii.” The production will include pyrotechnics, about 200 hula dancers and more than 750 contemporary dancers. (Cheyenne, the namesake star of an MTV reality show, will also perform.)

“I know what it is,” Mr. Kapono said of his Hawaiian heritage. “I know how rich it is, I know how beautiful it is. So that’s what I want to take forward. And the generations to come, I want them to take that forward. I want them to dream. I want them to have hopes. That’s how we build a foundation for new things.”

From the Underworld of Jamaica to the London Stage

By MICHAEL BRUNTON for TIME Magazine

It was a tough ticket the night the film The Harder They Come premiered at the Carib Theater in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972. A crowd of some 10,000 turned up and a near-riot ensued. Like all those who got in, the island's Prime Minister and his wife were jammed two or more to a seat, while instead of a red carpet entrance, director Perry Henzell's wife, Sally, had to be bodily lifted in over the heads of the crowd. Just 6 at the time, Henzell's daughter Justine wasn't allowed to attend, even though some of her earliest memories are of being on set while her father shot the film that was to become a milestone of Jamaican culture and one of cinema's most unlikely survival stories. Thirty-five years on, Justine Henzell, in London this week for the opening night of a musical version of The Harder They Come at the Theatre Royal, remembers what the fuss was all about. "Jamaicans had never seen themselves on the big screen before," she says. "In those days we hardly ever saw ourselves on TV or commercials, let alone in a feature film."

Beyond Jamaica, audiences were less excitable when the film opened. What, after all, were they to make of a radical slice of experimental cinema verite shot by an unknown director in Super 16 mm, about a Jamaican boy who leaves the idyllic poverty of the countryside for the squalid poverty of Kingston to follow his dream of becoming a recording star, only to die in a hail of bullets on the beach? Although Henzell's film was a sharp critique on the closed, cutthroat circle of corruption between the island's music industry, police, and drug dealers, what eventually made the rest of the world take note was the film's blistering soundtrack, which was a breakthrough moment for reggae music. As well as the songs like "Many Rivers To Cross" and "You Can Get It If You Really Want" that were written and sung by young singer Jimmy Cliff, (who also played the lead character, Ivan), the soundtrack showcased Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon." Before the world knew or cared about Bob Marley, here was reggae's defining mix of roots rhythms and social consciousness. For the decade before Marley's best-of album Legend in 1984, The Harder They Come was nothing less than the world's best-selling reggae album.

The success of the soundtrack helped sustain Henzell's film at the box office, where it has remained a cult staple of festivals and late-night college specials ever since. But after he struggled through the 70s to finance and shoot a still more experimental follow-up, No Place Like Home, the director's career stalled completely when the negatives went missing in a New Jersey warehouse. "It broke his heart when he lost that footage," says his daughter Justine. "He'd put all his time energy and money into it and then it was gone." So Henzell gave up on filmmaking and started writing books, which, like 1982's The Power Game, proved to be just as distinctive, well-reviewed and as un-lucrative as his movie career. A few years ago, the missing film was discovered in New York City and in 2006, Henzell finally licked No Place Like Home into shape and got it shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. In a poignant coda, the film had its Jamaican premiere on Dec. 1 — the day after Henzell, 70, died of cancer.

Over the years, Henzell had received various offers to stage The Harder They Come. "But he turned them all down," says Justine, "because they meant having to relinquish creative control — something Perry found very hard to do." But when Kerry Michael and Dawn Reid, directors of Stratford's Theatre Royal, on a trip to Jamaica four or five years ago, knocked on his door, they were only too pleased to have his creative input. So the musical version of The Harder They Come, as adapted by Perry Henzell and directed by Kerry Michael and Dawn Reid, opened last March at Stratford's 460-seat Theatre Royal, a plush Victorian-era playhouse with a modern mission to foster black and community productions. Against expectations, the musical's short-run became a word-of-mouth success and broke all their box office records, so now the show is being restaged there as a tribute to the late director but also with an eye on making the journey from the East End of London to the West End stage — a delicious and not so unlikely prospect for a theatreland that is high as a kite right now on musicals and nostalgia.

To get there, the production has sidestepped all the problems of making the music carry the plot by keeping the 17-strong cast and band onstage throughout. Between them, in thickest Jamaican patois and the merest whiff of ganja smoke, they summon the saucy spirit of the Kingston dancehall one minute, the legend of the outlaw the next. Best of all they rip through glorious renditions of hit after hit. Make room, Mamma Mia! For as sure as the sun will shine, The Harder They Come is gonna get its share.

Link to TIME: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1586884,00.html

Bob Marley's Sons to Hold JA Peace Concert

Bob Marley JA Peace Concert
Associated Press
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Four sons of Bob Marley will hold a concert promoting peace to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the musician's birth, a family spokesman said yesterday.

The Feb. 10 concert, called "Smile Jamaica," will be held in the reggae superstar's birthplace of Nine Miles, in St. Ann parish, spokesman Jerome Hamilton said.

The concert shares the name of a 1976 show staged by the government of former socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley to promote harmony among politically aligned gangs, and will feature Stephen Marley and his brothers Ky-Mani, Damian and Julian, Hamilton said.

"They are trying to push a message of peace although it won't be as hard-core as when Bob did it," he said.

Hamilton said Los Angeles-based Ziggy Marley, the most famous of the musician's children, was not able to attend and rarely visits Jamaica.

Ziggy Marley won four Grammys with the Melody Makers, a band that included brother Stephen and sisters Sharon and Cedella until they disbanded in 1999.

Marley's children and Rita Marley, the singer's widow, perform across the globe. Rita, who often accompanied her husband's band with her soul trio, the I-Threes, is expected to attend the St. Ann parish concert.

The February date coincides with Bob Marley Week, a celebration of the singer's birth on Feb. 6, 1945, and falls within the height of Jamaica's tourism season.

Marley rose from the gritty shantytowns of Kingston to global stardom in the 1970s with hits "No Woman, No Cry" and "I Shot the Sheriff." His lyrics promoting "one love" and social revolution made him an icon in developing countries worldwide. A devout Rastafarian, Marley died of cancer in Miami in 1981 at age 36.

Since his death, the music world and Rastafarian community have celebrated the birthday anniversary of the musician, whom some even consider a prophet.

Director of the reggae classic 'The Harder They Come' moves on to new adventures

Perry HenzellDirector of the reggae classic 'The Harder They Come', Jamaica's first home-grown feature film...
Perry Henzell, film director and writer: born Port Maria, Jamaica 7 March 1936; married 1965 Sally Densham (one son, two daughters); died Treasure Beach, Jamaica 30 November 2006.

The Harder They Come (1972) is a rough-hewn classic, the first and still the best home-grown Jamaican feature film. It is based on the life of Ivan Rhyging, a self-styled ghetto Robin Hood who died in a shoot-out with police in 1948, but the film's director, Perry Henzell, added an extra element by turning the gunman into an innocent country youth desperate to succeed in the cut-throat Kingston reggae world.

In Ivan, played by the local singer Jimmy Cliff, Henzell created a Jamaican rebel archetype; inspired by such an image, the Island Records boss Chris Blackwell - who had part-financed the movie - seized upon it in promoting his new signing, Bob Marley. In some ways the groundwork for Marley's eventual success was laid by the film having one of the best soundtrack albums ever released, an indispensible accompaniment to chic dinner parties of the early 1970s, introducing Jamaican music to the white album market; Henzell had personally chosen the record's reggae gems.

In making The Harder They Come, Henzell was influenced by such essays in realism as Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. "But I felt most realism was boring, very serious," he said. "I wanted to make realism lighter. I also realised I couldn't possibly write dialogue that was as good as what I heard people saying all around me. I was interested in capturing that poetry. That's sort of a cinéma vérité technique.

The Harder They Come, said the director, was "two movies really: on one hand, it was for people who were well-educated and who wanted a glimpse into another side of life. But in the Caribbean and Africa and Brazil, it would be for the poor, for people living in slums. The impact of The Harder They Come on Jamaica was enormous.

When the film was first shown in Kingston in 1972, it provoked riots by people unable to get into the sold-out Carib cinema.

But it was a different story when it opened later that year in London. "It was a difficult sell," said Henzell.

The first night the cinema was empty. Not one critic had gone down there to review it. I had to print up thousands of flyers and literally stand outside the underground station in Brixton and hand them out. That turned the tide. The film took off. Time and time again, everywhere, the film would just have died without a lot of hard work.

After a similar push in the United States, The Harder They Come ran as a midnight movie in Cambridge, Massachussetts, for seven years.

The film's enduring themes have stood the test of time. Earlier this year, a critically acclaimed stage musical of The Harder They Come, produced by Henzell, became the longest-running show ever at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Henzell missed most of this triumph, needing to travel to New York for treatment following a worsening of the cancer from which he had been suffering since 2000.

Henzell was a man who exuded an almost supernatural calm; he was always effortlessly congenial company, with a permanent twinkle of humour in his enquiring eyes. Both his parents were of old Caribbean stock, his father managing a sugar estate on the Jamaican north coast, where his only son and three daughters were born. After attending Shrewsbury School and McGill University in Montreal, Perry Henzell became a floor manager for BBC television in London.

In 1959, learning that television was about to start up in Jamaica, he returned to the island. There he set up Vista Productions, which over the next decade made hundreds of commercials, honing his directing skills. English commercials directors like Ridley Scott would use Vista's facilities.

By 1969 Henzell was ready to begin filming his first feature. Funded by relatives, as well as by Chris Blackwell, The Harder They Come was not finally completed until 1972, shot at weekends or in one or two-week bursts. During those three years cast members died, and were replaced by lookalikes, a method also employed when Jimmy Cliff was unavailable for a reshoot of the pivotal knife-fight scene.

Despite the film's success, Henzell made little money from it. His next feature, No Place Like Home, was intended to remedy that. But this story of an American film crew who travel to Jamaica to shoot an advertisement, and the subsequent love affair that develops, a conscious effort to present a different side of Jamaica from his first film, landed Henzell in an even more parlous state. Although the tale was probably apocryphal that he left the film's completed print in a New York taxi after consuming rather too much of the "herb" of which he could be fond, it added immeasurably to the director's mystique. (His own explanation was that a Manhattan storage facility had misplaced the reels.) Whatever, No Place Like Home remained unfinished.

Virtually bankrupt, Henzell retreated from the film business, to I-topia, his Jamaican country retreat. Working at night by oil-lamp - I-topia only recently acquired electricity - Perry Henzell wrote The Power Game, a dystopian vision of an unnamed Caribbean island (it was clear that it was Jamaica). Published in 1982, it is as riveting to read as The Harder They Come is to watch. More recently he wrote Cane, a novel about the 18th-century Jamaican sugar-trade, dividing his time between I-topia and Jake's, the award-winning boutique hotel established by his wife Sally in Treasure Beach on the south coast.

In 1988, with assistance from Toots and the Maytals, Henzell wrote a musical about the life of Marcus Garvey, the prophet of black consciousness; the show enjoyed a run in Kingston. Some 10 years ago, he attempted to make a sequel to The Harder They Come, arguing that the Ivan character had not been killed but only badly wounded in the gunfight that ends the original film. But when Jimmy Cliff turned out to have a similar idea and a competing script of his own, the plan foundered. Efforts to make a television series, Star Reporter, about a Jamaican journalist, were also scuppered.

Yet around the same time as Henzell's cancer was first diagnosed, a forgotten print of No Place Like Home turned up in New York - one of the actors turned out to be a young Grace Jones. As well as readying the musical of The Harder They Come, Henzell found funding to finish his second film.

The Jamaican premiere of No Place Like Home was held last night, the day after his death.

Chris Salewicz

Perry Henzell, film director and writer: born Port Maria, Jamaica 7 March 1936; married 1965 Sally Densham (one son, two daughters); died Treasure Beach, Jamaica 30 November 2006.

The Harder They Come (1972) is a rough-hewn classic, the first and still the best home-grown Jamaican feature film. It is based on the life of Ivan Rhyging, a self-styled ghetto Robin Hood who died in a shoot-out with police in 1948, but the film's director, Perry Henzell, added an extra element by turning the gunman into an innocent country youth desperate to succeed in the cut-throat Kingston reggae world.

In Ivan, played by the local singer Jimmy Cliff, Henzell created a Jamaican rebel archetype; inspired by such an image, the Island Records boss Chris Blackwell - who had part-financed the movie - seized upon it in promoting his new signing, Bob Marley. In some ways the groundwork for Marley's eventual success was laid by the film having one of the best soundtrack albums ever released, an indispensible accompaniment to chic dinner parties of the early 1970s, introducing Jamaican music to the white album market; Henzell had personally chosen the record's reggae gems.

In making The Harder They Come, Henzell was influenced by such essays in realism as Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. "But I felt most realism was boring, very serious," he said. "I wanted to make realism lighter. I also realised I couldn't possibly write dialogue that was as good as what I heard people saying all around me. I was interested in capturing that poetry. That's sort of a cinéma vérité technique.

The Harder They Come, said the director, was "two movies really: on one hand, it was for people who were well-educated and who wanted a glimpse into another side of life. But in the Caribbean and Africa and Brazil, it would be for the poor, for people living in slums. The impact of The Harder They Come on Jamaica was enormous.

When the film was first shown in Kingston in 1972, it provoked riots by people unable to get into the sold-out Carib cinema.

But it was a different story when it opened later that year in London. "It was a difficult sell," said Henzell.

The first night the cinema was empty. Not one critic had gone down there to review it. I had to print up thousands of flyers and literally stand outside the underground station in Brixton and hand them out. That turned the tide. The film took off. Time and time again, everywhere, the film would just have died without a lot of hard work.

After a similar push in the United States, The Harder They Come ran as a midnight movie in Cambridge, Massachussetts, for seven years.

The film's enduring themes have stood the test of time. Earlier this year, a critically acclaimed stage musical of The Harder They Come, produced by Henzell, became the longest-running show ever at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Henzell missed most of this triumph, needing to travel to New York for treatment following a worsening of the cancer from which he had been suffering since 2000.

Henzell was a man who exuded an almost supernatural calm; he was always effortlessly congenial company, with a permanent twinkle of humour in his enquiring eyes. Both his parents were of old Caribbean stock, his father managing a sugar estate on the Jamaican north coast, where his only son and three daughters were born. After attending Shrewsbury School and McGill University in Montreal, Perry Henzell became a floor manager for BBC television in London.

ALL SEAFOOD WILL RUN OUT BY 2050, SAY SCIENTISTS...

Overfishing May Harm Seafood Population
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

WASHINGTON (AP) - Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems," said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are - beyond anything we suspected," Worm said.

While the study focused on the oceans, concerns have been expressed by ecologists about threats to fish in the Great Lakes and other lakes, rivers and freshwaters, too.

Worm and an international team spent four years analyzing 32 controlled experiments, other studies from 48 marine protected areas and global catch data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's database of all fish and invertebrates worldwide from 1950 to 2003.

The scientists also looked at a 1,000-year time series for 12 coastal regions, drawing on data from archives, fishery records, sediment cores and archaeological data.

"At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed - that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating," Worm said. "If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime - by 2048."

"It looks grim and the projection of the trend into the future looks even grimmer," he said. "But it's not too late to turn this around. It can be done, but it must be done soon. We need a shift from single species management to ecosystem management. It just requires a big chunk of political will to do it."

The researchers called for new marine reserves, better management to prevent overfishing and tighter controls on pollution.

In the 48 areas worldwide that have been protected to improve marine biodiversity, they found, "diversity of species recovered dramatically, and with it the ecosystem's productivity and stability."

While seafood forms a crucial concern in their study, the researchers were analyzing overall biodiversity of the oceans. The more species in the oceans, the better each can handle exploitation.

"Even bugs and weeds make clear, measurable contributions to ecosystems," said co-author J. Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

The National Fisheries Institute, a trade association for the seafood industry, does not share the researchers alarm.

"Fish stocks naturally fluctuate in population," the institute said in a statement. "By developing new technologies that capture target species more efficiently and result in less impact on other species or the environment, we are helping to ensure our industry does not adversely affect surrounding ecosystems or damage native species.

Seafood has become a growing part of Americans' diet in recent years. Consumption totaled 16.6 pounds per person in 2004, the most recent data available, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That compares with 15.2 pounds in 2000.

Joshua Reichert, head of the private Pew Charitable Trusts' environment program, pointed out that worldwide fishing provides $80 billion in revenue and 200 million people depend on it for their livelihoods. For more than 1 billion people, many of whom are poor, fish is their main source of protein, he said.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis.

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Associated Press Writer John Heilprin contributed to this report.

Marijuana may help stave off Alzheimer’s

Active ingredient in pot may help preserve brain function

Updated: MSNBC - 4:31 p.m. ET Oct 5, 2006

WASHINGTON - Good news for aging hippies: smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function.

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana’s active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, can prevent the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from breaking down more effectively than commercially marketed drugs.

THC is also more effective at blocking clumps of protein that can inhibit memory and cognition in Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers reported in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

The researchers said their discovery could lead to more effective drug treatment for Alzheimer’s, the leading cause of dementia among the elderly.

Those afflicted with Alzheimer’s suffer from memory loss, impaired decision-making, and diminished language and movement skills. The ultimate cause of the disease is unknown, though it is believed to be hereditary.

Marijuana is used to relieve glaucoma and can help reduce side effects from cancer and AIDS treatment.

Prince Charles, Government of Jamaica to Fund Trench Town Housing

published: Daily Gleaner - Monday | October 2, 2006


The Prince of Wales, in partnership with the Government of Jamaica, is set to unveil a massive housing development plan for Trench Town, a British newspaper reported yesterday.

According to the Sunday Times, Prince Charles through his architectural charity, The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, has drawn up plans to redevelop the community by replacing concrete high-rise buildings with traditional lime-washed single-storey houses surrounded by palm trees.

According to the foundation's website, this charity was established to teach and demonstrate in practice those principles of traditional urban design and architecture which put people and the communities of which they are a part, at the centre of the design process.

The report said 3,000 people are to benefit from the redevelopment. The plans are to be unveiled by his representatives here this month.

Construction of the first street could begin as soon as December. The foundation, according to the report, will fund a row of 20 homes, at a cost of £250,000 or approximately J$30.2 million. The Government is expected to provide an initial £2.5 million or J$307.5 million to fund the entire project.

Development is set to take place near reggae icon Bob Marley's old home, Culture Yard, in the community.

The Gleaner made efforts to contact Member of Parliament for the community, Dr. Omar Davies, and the Minister of Information and Development, Colin Campbell, for further details on the project, but was unsuccessful.

This is the second such project geared at redeveloping the often-neglected Kingston community. Residents are currently benefiting from the National Housing Trust's Inner-city Housing Project. Recently, 252 units were handed over to residents of the community by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

Several of Jamaica's reggae superstars, including the legendary Marley, grew up in Trench Town. The community, however, has been plagued by political and gang violence, poverty and high levels of unemployment for several years.

Construction of the first street could begin as soon as December. The foundation, according to the report, will fund a row of 20 homes, at a cost of £250,000 or approximately J$30.20 million.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

September 24, 2006
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

Made in Jamaica, A Powerful Portrait of the Reggae Music Movement

Toronto International Film Festival presents the worldwide premiere of Made in Jamaica, a powerful portrait of the reggae music movement

TORONTO – August 28, 2006


The Toronto International Film Festival features the worldwide premiere of Made in Jamaica, a feature length documentary telling how a small island nation of only three million people has made music that resonates around the world. The first screening, for Press & Industry, takes place at the Royal Ontario Museum, on Tuesday, September 12, 2006, at 2:30PM.

Made in Jamaica tells how reggae became such a worldwide phenomenon and provides a powerful portrait of the leaders of the movement. Filmmaker Jerome Laperrousaz tells how reggae music sprang into life in the 70s, making Jamaica one of the first third world countries to make itself heard on an international scale. The reggae sound became a celebration of life and a universal message of hope.

But the movement did not stop there. Now a new generation of reggae artists has emerged, influenced by their predecessors, but creating a new and equally as important brand of music. Dancehall, emerging from reggae, is drawing large crowds from across the world. At its core, dancehall is influenced by religion. But like rap music, its message contains lyrics about sex, violence, and social issues, including much on women’s rights. Its messages are important, powerful and straightforward.

The film features the best reggae and dancehall artists ever assembled. Extensive interviews throughout, with names such as Toots (2005 Grammy award winner), Gregory Isaacs, Bunny Wailer, Blessed, Tanya Stephens, Elephant Man, Koolant and Third World, the film describes how they have struggled to leave their native ghetto to achieve international fame and create a musical phenomenon in the process. In essence, it is about how they are the embodiment of the “Jamaican Dream”.

Standouts include the story of Lady Saw, who has collaborated with music sensations No Doubt and is routinely called “The First Lady of Dancehall”. She was born in St. Mary in 1972 and in 1994 she recorded the single Want it Tonight.

Also featured is Capleton, a 2006 Grammy award nominee. He is one of the best reggae music deejays of his generation. He has produced numerous dancehall classics and is constantly topping the charts.

Also featured in the film are some standout live performances. Laperrousaz weaves between the interviews, a selection of the beautiful and uplifting music of reggae and the grinding sounds of dancehall. The performances from many of the featured artists capture the spirit and struggle of Jamaican music and provide the perfect complement to the illuminating interviews.

Filmmaker Jerome Laperrousaz has 25 years of family history in Jamaica. In 1980 he directed Prisoners in the Street: ‘Third World’ (Cannes Festival selection), which highlighted Jamaican reggae through the experience of the group Third World. His past films include Continental Circus (Jean Vigo and Academy Award selection for foreign production) and Human in which he cast Terence Stamp and Jeanne Moreau. He has a special talent for exposing the sensitive and personal and this is especially evident in Made in Jamaica. He is able to capture the recording studios of Kingston alongside the pulsing sounds of Ochos- Rios and the morning light of the Blue Mountains in all its full glory.

Made in Jamaica (a co-production between Lawrence Pictures and Herold & Family), is making its worldwide premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be a treat for fans of reggae and dancehall and for those unfamiliar, it will be the perfect introduction.

Hill Penned Socially Conscious Lyrics

BEFORE the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq, the reggae group Culture recorded an album called "World Peace."

Lead singer and songwriter Joseph Hill penned lyrics that reflected the concerns of many people around the world as the threat of war loomed:

We can’t take another war/ We want world peace/ Every day the children are crying/ Mamas and fathers are dying/ Nuff man gone to war and na return . . . " he wrote in World Peace.

By the time the album was released in 2003, the fighting had begun.

In a career that spanned three decades, such socially conscious lyrics, backed by roots rhythms and delivered in what was once described as "one of those distinctive Jamaican voices that recalls the village elder passing on centuries of tradition," earned Hill a place of respect in the world of reggae music.

Hill died on Saturday in Berlin, where the group was performing. He was 57. The cause of death was not immediately known. The group planned to continue the tour with Hill’s son Kenyatta singing lead vocals in his father’s place, according to a website posting by Jim Dooley, a Hill biographer.

Though not as famous as Bob Marley, Hill belonged musically to the same generation as Marley, part of the first line of reggae artists who early in the history of the genre found international success.

"People early on understood his talent and responded to it," said Chris Wilson, vice president of artists and repertoire for Heartbeat Records, which released Culture’s last album, "World Peace." "Many artists . . . live in their own rarefied world. He was always of the people . . . He was so concerned about what was going on in the world around him."

Hill was born January 22, 1949 in the Jamaican parish of St Catherine. He came of age musically during what has been dubbed "the golden age" of reggae, with contemporaries such as Marley and Burning Spear.

At Studio One, a recording studio in Jamaica, Hill began his career with the group Soul Defenders. As a vocalist he released a single, "Behold the Land." But his work with a trio formed with his cousin Albert Walker and Kenneth Dayes in 1976 was groundbreaking.

The group’s first album, "Two Sevens Clash," was based on a prophesy of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey. Garvey had predicted that an apocalypse would erupt on July 7, 1977. The album was a hit in Jamaica and Britain.

In a 1987 review in the Los Angeles Times, writer Don Snowden described "Two Sevens Clash" as one of the best reggae albums ever recorded. In 2002, Rolling Stone included the album on its list of the 50 coolest records of all time.

From the start, Hill distinguished himself as the group’s frontman. Snowden described Hill’s sound as "rich and dark, liquid yet grainy, his voice sounded the way Guinness stout looks."

In the group’s early recordings, Hill also set himself apart from other artists by singing lead vocals and then recording second lead vocals. On those second lead vocals, Hill offered spoken word-style commentary on what he sang in the first. The effect was a textured sound and a rich conversation.

"It really was like poetry or early rap," Wilson said. "I think as he got older he felt more compelled to make his statement (declarative), rather than have sort of the Greek chorus. Those two voices melded together."

Hill viewed music as having a purpose, one that did not change over the years.

"Our message was a positive one," Hill said in a 2003 article in New Times Broward-Palm Beach. "From a very young age, I was aware of the roots and beauty of the country. I also noticed when the community began to collapse and what a dangerous thing that was. I began to see the corruption out there, and what I saw came out in my lyrics."

The lyrics of Hill, who was a Rastafarian, also resonated with listeners in Jamaica because they drew upon the island’s proverbs and sayings.

But his fame was international and his audience included people "who could have been the children of the people he first was writing for," Wilson said. After concerts "they would come up to him as if he were a spokesman for their generation." — Los Angeles Times.