Singer Queen

s t o ry  b y  Steve Knopper p h o t o s  b y  Jon Whittle Ifrica grew up

immersed in the
green landscapes
and distinctive
sounds that have
inspired decades of
Jamaican music.

t h e  b e a t  o f

ja m a ica
Reggae — the world’s most recognizable island music —
didn’t end with Bob Marley. A pop-music expert takes to the
streets and the hills to see what stirs it up.

64
 s
hocking. i’m standing in
the lobby of a Jamaican resort,
and I’m listening to a Bob
Marley tune. Four musicians
play “Buffalo Soldier” at Sandals
Montego Bay as honeymoon-
ers sip umbrella drinks and tap
feet to the song’s unmistakable reggae rhythm. The
resort’s perfect beach, 50 yards away, runs along the
shimmering blue-green ocean. “We play a lot of Bob
Marley,” bassist Fitzroy Thompson says later. “He’s
the foundation,” adds drummer Nordy Lewis.
Of course, Marley didn’t invent reggae or its older
sibling ska. Their roots are in mento, an offshoot of
calypso. And since Marley’s death in 1981, reggae has
morphed into dancehall, an electronic style resem-
bling American hip-hop. Jon the photographer
and I have come to trace those transformations. At
­hallowed studios and dance clubs — sites that docu-
ment both gentle, spiritual reggae and loud beats —
I plan to ask key players what exactly makes reggae
reggae? How did it evolve? And where does Marley,
still revered, fit into today’s mix? The answers lie
somewhere in Jamaica’s gritty streets and green hills.
The next day, we’re standing on Gloucester
Avenue in Montego Bay. It’s a sort of mini Vegas
strip, packed with tchotchke shops and cheap
buffets. Sandals employees directed us here for
the best dancehall music. We ask Bobby, a local
hustler, for the same thing. “No problem,” he
says. “Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.” Jon and I
exchange glances. The tourist chain?
But sure enough, hours later, past 3 a.m., we find
ourselves wedged into a corner of Margaritaville,
ordering Red Stripe beers, feeling the bass in our
ribs and the melody in our hips. It’s mostly locals,
but we spot tourist couples in flip-flops as well, all
getting into it. Soon there’s a commotion as pop star
Sean Kingston hops on stage to sing and spin records.
“Or we can leave the slums, go to paradise,” one of his
lyrics goes. It’s obvious he’s talking about the same
“Concrete Jungle” Marley chronicled, but the boom-
ing music makes the connection seem tenuous.
After his set, I elbow through the throng to ask
how Marley’s laid-back reggae transformed into
this. In a patois I can barely make out amid the din,
Kingston says: “You gotta come back to your roots,
to your culture. I just remember my history.” Then

the crowd engulfs him. But which roots? How can
one shared history produce such distinct styles?
The next morning — OK, noon — I drag Jon
out of bed and drive to the upscale Iberostar Rose
Hall Beach to meet singer Queen Ifrica. She and
manager Tony Rebel, himself a dancehall vet-
eran, shuffle from the cavernous lobby into the
sunshine. A young man in dreads introduces
himself as a fan and hands the queen a clump of
marijuana, which she accepts with a smile. Like
As Sandals Mon- many Jamaicans, including Marley, the 34-year-
tego Bay grooves
now, Rose Hall old daughter of reggae singer Derrick Morgan
plantation (oppo- is a Rastafarian. She worships former Ethiopian
site page) reflects emperor Haile Selassie I as Jah, a version of God
Jamaica’s history.
Yesterday and today returning to earth. Rastafarians smoke pot (tech-
come together in nically illegal in Jamaica) as a religious ritual and
Damian Marley, wear dreadlocks. The queen dyes her dreads the
shown performing
at the reggae festi- red, green and yellow of the Ethiopian flag, a sym-
val Sumfest 2009. bol of Rasta defiance. She hands the pot to Tony,
who sniffs it like a fine cigar and nods approvingly.
They take us to Rose Hall, a white-brick build-
ing from the late 1700s that overlooks the ocean.
Growing up in Montego Bay, Queen Ifrica took
school tours here. “You’d imagine what it would
be like,” she says, motioning toward the mani-
cured grass. “Slaves walking right over there.” I
tell her that the slavery connection reminds me
of American blues, also grown from oppression.
“It’s the same way in Jamaica,” she says.
I can feel those contradictions — oppression
and the resistance that gave birth to the music. Her
own pulsing beats support lyrics about racism and
child abuse. I’m beginning to understand where
the content comes from. But something changed to
make reggae sound so distinctly Jamaican, unique
from blues or anything American. To find out how,
we have to go where that sound has always come
from. We have to go downtown. | downtown >>

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W
e get lost. the drive to
downtown Kingston climbs
into the hills before flattening
and widening into smoke and
congestion. Jon is an excel-
lent driver, but he isn’t insane,
which makes him unqualified
to drive in Jamaica. I slam the invisible brake as
massive Leyland trucks pass at full speed and slip
into traffic a few feet in front of us. At South Parade
and Orange Street, a raucous urban market thick
with pedestrians, we ask a woman gutting a fish for
directions. She points the way with a knife.
“There’s not really a lot of museums,” Damian
Marley had told me backstage at Sumfest. I’d asked
the pop star, Bob’s 31-year-old son, where to look
for reggae history. “Go on an adventure,” he said.
“Get out in the streets and meet the people.” Our
Kingston guide, local writer Kaci Hamilton, meets us
68
at Strawberry Hill, a hotel owned by Chris Blackwell,
who founded Island Records, signed Bob Marley
and made him a star in the United States. In her tiny
Honda, Kaci takes us to Trench Town, where Marley
and other reggae stars got their start. It’s bleak —
small, hard shacks in faded pink, green and yellow. A
notorious shantytown, parts of which were built on a
sewage dump, Trench Town has been home to post-
slavery “sufferers” since the early 1900s. At Marley’s
early squatter’s home, guide Donnette Dowe shows
us the burned-out Volkswagen van from which the
singer sold his landmark album Catch a Fire.
Kaci’s phone rings. We rush across town to
Harry J Studio, a nondescript building where the
Wailers recorded several albums. Today, Sly Dunbar,
drummer for the great production duo Sly and
Robbie, and a makeshift band of studio pioneers
are demonstrating Jamaican rhythms, including ska
and reggae, for a TV show called Music Voyager.
“Instead of the
beat on the ONE,
two, THREE, four,
it’s on the TWO,
three, FOUR. You
see? That’s the
only difference.”
Just before the session, I coax Ernie Ranglin, was 1959, and producer Clement “Sir Coxsone”
the band’s 77-year-old guitarist, outside to dis- Dodd desperately wanted a fresh sound to set him
cuss reggae’s roots. In the late 1950s, Jamaicans apart from his competitors. He met with guitarist
fell in love with American R&B stars such as Fats Ranglin one Sunday and — voilà!
Domino and Wynonie Harris. Then DJs in urban You make it seem so simple, I tell Ranglin. This
Kingston shifted from playing hit American was a revolutionary innovation! Without that impor-
records at “sound-system” dance parties to making tant shift in the beat, there would be no Bob Marley
their own records in studios. But, I ask Ranglin, — not to mention Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, or even
who invented the distinctive reggae beat? “I was the Clash, the Police, UB40 and Gwen Stefani.
the first one,” he says flatly. He was a studio gui- “It had to be something we can say, ‘It was ours,’”
A crew from the tarist back then. “Where we got the ska from — it he says. “We needed something to identify ourselves.”
Music Voyager TV
show films Ernie was from New Orleans. But instead of the beat on Then he heads back into the studio. I feel like I’ve
Ranglin (acoustic the ONE, two, THREE, four, it’s on the TWO, just spoken with Thomas Jefferson in an open-collar
guitar), Sly Dunbar three, FOUR. You shirt, who has excused himself to go inside and rewrite
(drums) and other
musicians laying see? That’s t he the Declaration of Independence. So why haven’t
down Jamaican only difference.” It you heard of Ernie Ranglin? | touching bob >>
beats. Ranglin
(opposite) says he
invented reggae’s > Hear the beat Jamaica episodes of Music Voyager air starting in ­February on
defining rhythm. PBS and National Geographic channels. Get more info at islands.com/music.
 History is still in the
making at Kingston’s
legendary record shop
­Rockers International.
Musician PG one 3
(pictured) works here
and makes dancehall
music on the side.

70 J a n u a r y / Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 0 islands . c om J a n u a r y / Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 0 islands . c om 71

A
t first, that innovation
in the beat merely led to hits
on the radio — like what Ran-
glin considers the first ska song,
Theophilus Beckford’s “Easy
Snappin’,” in 1959. (It’s well
worth the 99 cents on iTunes.)
It took Bob Marley to turn reggae into an interna-
tional symbol of peace and insanely rocking music
over the next two decades. Today, Marley’s record-
ings seem both timeless and frozen in time. His
­image blends into the Jamaican landscape, an artifact,
like Elvis in Las Vegas or even George ­Washington
in D.C. Yet the whole idea of Marley, beyond any
single song, retains a power that hovers over Marga-
ritaville as it does over downtown Kingston.
Searching for the source of that power, Jon and I
head toward Ocho Rios. For miles, it’s mostly zinc-
covered shacks, with goats and dogs wandering sharp
72
Sterling admits
he can’t explain
where all the
­talent comes
from. Then his
band plays
a distinctive
rhythm. “Singin’
don’t worry
about a thing.”
curves along mountain walls. Then trees give way to
Brown’s Town, where locals rush to work in taverns
and markets with hand-lettered signs like “Devon
House i Scream” and “Tipsy Bikini and Booze.”
Civilization fades as we climb farther up the hills,
into tiny Nine Miles, where Marley grew up before
he moved to Kingston. Behind a huge wooden gate,
the Bob Marley Centre and Mausoleum is solemn
and funky. Like Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, Mar-
ley’s white-marble crypt is festooned with candles,
drawings, bracelets and other tokens of fans’ esteem.
A tour guide named Crazy invites us to lay our hands
on the crypt. I do so, and think about how Bob man-
aged to be both rebel (as a “rude boy” stalking Kings-
ton’s streets) and spiritual man of peace (making
songs like “One Love”) in the same personality.
Crazy interrupts my reverie. “All the ladies who
touch Bob,” he says of the man with 13 children by
several women, “don’t worry — you’re pregnant!”
J a n u a r y / Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 0 islands . c om
That runs through my head as Jon and I drive back
down the hills with plants and roots whooshing by
in a blur of green, yellow and brown. Then it dawns
on me: Fertility is the key. In Jamaica, ­everything
grows prolifically — even children. It’s why couples
come here on their honeymoons. They can feel it.
Locals feel it too, even in concrete jungles distant
from trees, roots and beaches. Musicians feel it and
create new styles. Marley wasn’t the source. Neither
was Ranglin, per se, and neither is Sean Kingston
today. Jamaica itself is the source of Jamaican music.
That sound could come from nowhere else.
We stop afterward at Dunn’s River Falls, a
Jamaica’s hills crowded tourist attraction. A sidewalk band barely
and towns cradle
infinite musical seems to notice the 100-degree heat. Bass ­player
­creativity. Bass Alwood Sterling, 70, plucks rusty metal keys on
player Alwood a percussion box between his legs. I ask him how
Sterling (opposite)
and his band tap so much creativity happens to come from this one
that beat every day. tiny island. ­Earlier I had asked veteran reggae singer
­ ocoa Tea the same question. “If we weren’t born
C
with this much talent,” he said, “what would we do?
It’s something to get ourselves out of trouble.” Ster-
ling suggests Jamaican runner Usain Bolt is part of
the phenomenon, but he admits he can’t explain
it. We’re cutting into prime moneymaking time, so
Sterling and the band politely excuse themselves
and begin a rickety mento ballad that reminds
me of American hillbilly music — only based on
Ranglin’s distinctive rhythm. Then they
ease into the familiar strum of “Three book
Little Birds,” another Bob Marley clas- now
p. 9 1
sic. “Singin’ don’t worry about a thing …”
It’s time to get back in the car and crank the
dancehall music and the AC — praise Jah for air
conditioning. “’Cause every little thing is gonna be
all right.” But I keep nodding to the beat for a few
more minutes, feeling the sun on my neck, the two
and the four in my chest. islands.com/jamaica
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