FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Beatz Me by FFWD Staff As you might have heard, Carifest has had their funding cut by $10,000 this year after being denied a grant from the Calgary Regional Arts Foundation. Although it makes up less than 10 per cent of their budget, the money will be sorely missed and could affect the quality of one of Calgary’s best cultural and music fairs. Now, why should anyone who reads this column care? Simply for the fact that without Caribbean music, and Jamaican music in particular, the dance and urban music scene of today would look nothing like it does. Let’s start with the remix. Back in the early ’60s there was an engineer named King Tubby working in the studio on some ska tracks. In order to make sure the vocal levels were right, he faded out the instrumental tracks. When he brought them back in, it brought a whole new dimension to the sound. Tubby started producing versions of songs that would cut in between the vocals and instrumentals while at the same time playing with the levels of the bass and treble, creating tracks the like of which no one had heard before. Soon every track released by anybody in Jamaica had a "version," or "dub," on the B-side by producers like Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bunny Lee, Keith Hudson and Tubby’s protégé, Scientist. Much like any 12-inch single you buy today. And where were these singles heard? On huge, ear-splitting sound systems that played records all night and past the crack of dawn. In fact, thanks to good ol’ capitalism, the competition for customers was fierce between the systems and only the ones with the fattest sound and freshest grooves would survive. Particularly popular were the DJs. No, not the guys spinning records but the guys talking (or "toasting") over the instrumental parts of the recording. In 1967 Lester Sterling released what could be called the first rap record, "Sir Collin’s Special," when he spoke over the rhythm for the entire track. Wildly popular, it opened the door for a whole new genre that was polished to perfection by the likes of U-Roy, I-Roy and Big Youth, whose toasting topics were much akin to those of MCs today. There were message toasts, boast toasts, nonsense toasts, party toasts, insult toasts and, shades of Chuck D’s "Black CNN," news toasts. As for the DJ as we know it, well, it can be traced back to the West Bronx when a guy named Kool Herc cooked up the biggest, crispest sound system that New York had ever seen. Having come from Jamaica, he was familiar with the whole set-up, and just like Prince Buster in the ’50s, he would shout out catchphrases like "This is the joint!" and "Rock on my mellow!" over the instrumental parts. Finding that funk worked better than reggae in N.Y., he studied what made people dance until he had it distilled down to the break, the few bars where the drummer goes crazy and the dancers did too. Discovering that he could use two copies of the same record and play that section continuously, Herc changed dance music forever with what he christened "break-beats." Incidentally, the most popular beat, "Apache," was recorded by a predominately Jamaican outfit, The Incredible Bongo Band, in a Vancouver studio. It’s unsurprising then that a quarter of a century later, out of all of the dancefloor dialects, it is breakbeat that carries the torch (or is that the spliff?) highest. Groups like Hardwire, Kitachi, Death In Vegas, Pick & Mixed and Monkey Mafia effectively marry skank, toasting and dub to breakbeat, but the most successful of them all are the Freestylers, whose album We Rock Hard (Freskanova) has just been released in North America on the Mammoth label. Guaranteed one of the funkiest albums you’ve heard in a long time, it’s an all-out aural assault of breakbeats, airhorns, sound effects, 303s, gunshots, bouncing bass, MCs, old school samples and highly hummable melodies. It’s strongest when it sticks to its reggae roots on tracks like "Spaced Invader," Dancehall Vibes," "Here We Go" and the hits "Ruffneck" and "B-Boy Stance." Destined to be one of the biggest party albums of the summer, it’ll have the whole house rockin’ hard all night long. If, like Homer J. Simpson, you’ve been in Babylon too long and you need some live reggae to get away, you’ll want to check out Reggae Fest ’99 down at Thorncliffe Community Centre on Friday, May 28. With a lineup that includes the legendary Frankie Paul, Mellow Man, Patrick, Len Hammond, and Calgary’s own Sky Hawk and Strugglah, the smoke will be as thick as the bass beats and the night will be as hot as the Jamaican sun. Doin’ the same thing down at Venum that night will be the Euphoria World Order, better known individually as Venum resident Rocketboy, High Test and Pump Hill record label owner Pat Sojka, new kid on the block DJ Booth, and the don of the dancefloor, Domenic G. If serious house music is more your style, strongly recommended is deep house majordomo DJ Iz, playing the night before (Thursday, May 27) at Arena. Producer of some extremely soulful records, his pedigree includes releasing the first single on Guidance Records with his partner Diz, a new single "Iz and Diz Present The Bioflavanoids" on NRK Records, and he’s featured on United DJs Of America Vol. 9 - It’s Love (Moonshine). Here’s your chance to hear some of the best deep house in the world, right in your backyard, from both Iz and resident Jonathan Nodrick. Not to be missed by any real house heads.

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