Published:Wednesday | July 4, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
If the Billboard Reggae Albums Chart for the week ending July 7 seems very much like the one for the previous week (which completed half of 2018 for the listing), then that is because in part it is. Exactly. The top five remains unchanged. So...
Published:Thursday | June 28, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Lighthouse, which appears on Bushman's 2004 album Signs, is a departure from his usual approach of recording lyrics that he has written. Still, he says, "I an I open to a song as long as me feel it lyrically and it have substantial value." He adds...
Published:Thursday | June 21, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The old Goodyear factory in Springfield, St Thomas, has attracted many an intention for pressing it back into service. But, unlike the tyres that were once made there and eventually fitted to motor vehicles, none of the plans has gained traction....
Published:Friday | June 15, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Musical Youth's official biography, a printed 48-page keepsake, says, "it was in Birmingham that Michael and Kelvin Grant, Junior and Patrick Waite, and Dennis Seaton were born and grew up. It's still the boys' home base, the place they know and...
Published:Tuesday | June 12, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Sting and Shaggy are a number one combination for yet another week on the Billboard Reggae Albums Chart as their ‘44/876’ has held on to the top spot for the listing valid up to Saturday, June 16. However, the remixes version of...
Published:Thursday | June 7, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Irie Souljah wrote the lyrics to his song Who is the Immigrant, which appears on his 2015 album Immigrant, after watchin g scenes of Africans trying to get to his home country - Spain. At the time, he was living in Stony...
Published:Tuesday | May 29, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Irie Souljah's debut album, Immigrant, was released in 2015 - a year after he moved to Jamaica from his home country Spain.The album's title track was written after he saw footage of some Africans' desperate - and often doomed - struggle to get to...
Published:Friday | May 18, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
After negotiating traffic barriers in the west Kingston zone of special operations (ZOSO), which soldiers readily move as the marked Gleaner vehicle approaches, then going through Trench Town, The Sunday Gleaner's recent day across Kingston with...
Published:Thursday | May 10, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The 1971 Movie Star marked a move into independence for singer Errol Dunkley after recording for Prince Buster and Joe Gibbs, among other producers. Like many performers, Dunkley was dissatisfied with the returns, and he partnered with a talented...
Published:Wednesday | May 2, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The Billboard Reggae Albums Chart valid up to Saturday, May 5, is striking for the number of entries that were not on the previous edition.Not all of the incoming sets are unfamiliar as some of them have made the chart before. And with seven of the...
Published:Thursday | April 26, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
In the posthumous 2000 Peter Tosh album Live at the One Love Peace Concert, spoken words are listed in three places. The 40-second track four is named Intro Rap, and track five is the combination Burial/Speech, timed at 12 minutes and 17 seconds. In...
Published:Thursday | April 26, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Herbie Miller, director-curator of the Jamaica Music Museum (JaMM) in the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), was the personal manager of singer and musician Peter Tosh in 1978 and saw first-hand the Stepping Razor's reluctance to participate in the One...
Published:Thursday | April 19, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
By 1972, singer Errol Dunkley had established a track record of turning out popular songs. Movie Star (remade by Wayne Wonder and Buju Banton in the early 1990s) had hit the year before, and You'll Never Know had started the decade strongly for...
Published:Friday | April 13, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
'Holiday', the 2009 combination by singer Chevaughn and dancer-turned-deejay Ding Dong, celebrating all breaks from the hum-drum of daily routines, could have been Rainy Day. Chevaughn went to the Notice Productions base off Manning's Hill Road, St...
Published:Friday | April 6, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
There are points during the annual Road March through Kingston's streets, that the DJ hails persons from various countries and, as Carnival in Jamaica climaxes today, Kamal Bankay, expects a vigorous response to the names of a number of Caribbean...
Published:Thursday | April 5, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Whether by the straight route, the crow tends to fly off from the Carib Cinema, Cross Roads, property's back gate and on to Brentford Road then turning left, the movie house is very close to music house.So it did not take long for an 11-year-old...
Published:Thursday | March 29, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
On Wednesday, The Gleaner reported that in 2017, approximately 56.4 per cent of Jamaicans supported the idea of a military coup under extraordinary circumstances. This was up from 39.7 per cent in 2006 and 49.2 per cent in 2014.It is a good time to...
Published:Friday | March 23, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
There are many things about the World Clash event slated to take place on July 19 as part of Reggae Sumfest's 25th anniversary staging. For one, it is a 20th anniversary celebration of the sound system event brand - Garfield 'Chin' Bourne of...
Published:Friday | March 23, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
With Startime being a vintage music concert, inevitably as time has passed, so have a number of performers who have made an impression at various stagings.Startime organiser Michael Barnett remembers moments when songs by some of the performers who...
Published:Tuesday | March 20, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Kamal Bankay of the National Carnival Stakeholders Committee, has welcomed a proposed march by church members in response to the annual Carnival Road March. “They are welcome and encouraged to express their views and to show us how...
Published:Wednesday | March 21, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Kamal Bankay makes a distinction between two stages of Jamaica Carnival. There is the one that widened the celebration's scope in the early 1990s, moving the road march from largely a UWI-student-driven affair on the Mona Campus to a one-day...
Published:Monday | March 19, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Perched on a bench in Campion College's Duck Pond, Yendi Foo is in a peculiar position - figuratively. As she gesticulates in amplifying her verbal instructions to the student thespians, she is directing in an abridged version of 'A Midsummer Night'...
Published:Friday | March 16, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
In the 1990s, Nadine Sutherland walked into a record store in London, England, and was congratulated for having a number one song with deejay Buju Banton. Her response was, "I don't have a song with Buju Banton."After some insistence on both sides,...
Published:Friday | March 16, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The chirp of children's voices was a constant throughout a call to Nadine Sutherland on her birthday, last week Thursday.In addition to the general Twitter well-wishers, some spoke directly to her there were some birthday wishes and a couple of...
Published:Tuesday | March 13, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
As the State pushes to restore the old city from the waterfront northwards, where King Street meets South Parade, a church operation has begun to extend the life of an instrument which in part symbolises another renewal of the capital - its...
