The History Of Ska Music

12 Pages 3050 Words

These two men were Duke Reid and Clement Seymour Dodd. Their use of sound systems was recording tracks without labeling the vinyl so other people could not see what they played and could not “steal” it for their own sound systems. Both Dodd and Reid were known to scratch out labels on records they purchased during trips to places in America, in order to make releases seem exclusive. Throughout the end of the decade both men conducted a musical war.
In 1954, the first big Jazz concert was staged at Ward Theatre in Kingston, Jamaica. The traditional mento/folk/calypso bands played frequently in hotels up and down the island. By the end of the 1950's, jazz, R&B, and mento influences caused recording studios and companies to seek out new talent in large numbers. The Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation even began stimulating young musicians through regular radio shows. It was at this time that Dodd and Duke Reid started pressing their own releases on the island using local musicians and was done at one of the island's first recording studios.
The sound system war escalated to the point that individual role models were sent to competiting sound system parties just to cause problems, and were known as "Dance Hall Crashers.” Despite the primitive recording facilities, it was the determination of individual role models of ska enthusiasm that enabled the music to become the first “true” commercial Jamaican Music. Interestingly enough, by 1958 rhythm and blues instrumental style went out of style in the United States. It was at this same time that Britain’s first independent record label was established. The founding father of the independent record label was a businessman of Serbo-Croatian origin by the name of Emil Shallit. His increasingly popularized record label, Melodisc, only offered few Jamaicans recordings in the late 1950s. Shallit had no interest in music, which is evident because he once compared record se...