Published:Friday | January 5, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Tony Rebel recorded Fresh Vegetable to satisfy an insistent Penthouse Records producer, Donovan Germain. And although Germain pressed him for a quarter of a year to put vocals to a rhythm on which Beres Hammond had done the enduring ode to a man's...
Published:Wednesday | January 3, 2018 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Willie Brown returned to Christianity along the broad dual carriageway of a professional comedian and ventriloquist. Brown, who performed at the Boxing Day 2017 Comedy Cook-up at the National Indoor Sports Centre along with his doll pals - Uncle...
Published:Wednesday | December 27, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
About midway through his performance at Tuesday’s Comedy Cook-Up, Owen ‘Blakka’ Ellis defined the fusion of Christian worship and laughter which was playing out to a large audience at the National Indoor Sports Centre...
Published:Thursday | December 21, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
There was a call for books at Bookophilia, 92 Hope Road, St Andrew, recently, even as three poets Millicent Graham, Monica Minott and Ann-Margaret Lim - read `from their poetry books and sometimes work that is yet to be incorporated into a...
Published:Friday | December 22, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
I was listening - as usual - to FAME's Retroactive Wednesday earlier this week and they played a number of Ninja Man songs back to back. As much as I enjoyed his deejaying ,I felt sad, and that was not because Desmond Ballentine will be close to 80...
Published:Wednesday | December 20, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Ninja Man has performed at GT Taylor Christmas Extravaganza about 12 times in the concert's 17-year history, and if not for his life sentence for murder, would have been on stage for the 2017 staging on Monday at the Luana Sports Complex, St...
Published:Tuesday | December 19, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Strictly speaking, the Billboard ranking of reggae albums, which was updated yesterday, is not the final chart for 2017. It is for the week ending Saturday, December 30, so next Tuesday, a listing which includes New Year's Eve 2017 will be issued....
Published:Monday | December 18, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
It has been a long time since credits rolled at the end of a film at the Ambassador on Collie Smith Drive in Trench Town, St Andrew. Instead, there is the hum of classes in session, run by the Joy Town Community Development Foundation. Once in a...
Published:Friday | December 15, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Without saxophonist Dean Fraser's urging, Tarrus Riley would not have recorded Beware, the song that ended up as the third track on his 2006 VP Records album Parables. The song of caution to the innocent to keep an eye out for the wanton killers is...
Published:Thursday | December 14, 2017 | 2:30 PMMel Cooke
I can't pinpoint when I first saw Beres Hammond perform, but I know that a Western Consciousness concert at Llandilo, Westmoreland, was the first time I saw him sing Live On with Marcia Griffiths.And that, my goodly folks, is unforgettable. Much...
Published:Tuesday | December 12, 2017 | 4:12 PMMel Cooke
Dub poet Malachi Smith has performed in Taiwan, St Kitts and Nevis, Canada, South Africa, Colombia, Nicaragua, "all over the United States" (where he lives), and, of course, repeatedly in the land of his birth, Jamaica.Still, his school tour of...
Published:Tuesday | December 12, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Tribal Seeds, the band from San Diego, California, founded by brothers Steven and Tony-Ray Jacobs, is heading into the 2017 Christmas season on top of the Billboard Reggae Charts.Their Roots Party set has hit number one in its chart debut and sits...
Published:Friday | December 8, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
In 1980, Bob Marley and The Wailers performed at the Rufaro Stadium in Mbare after the British flag was lowered at midnight, when the clock ticked over the 17th into the 18th and a racist Rhodesia became an independent Zimbabwe.The newly named...
Published:Friday | December 8, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The Meaning of Christmas came easily to Barrington Gardiner, the acrostic song flowing "through my brain, into my hands, on to the paper," as he tells The Sunday Gleaner.So he wrote a line for each letter of the time of year when little children...
Published:Friday | December 8, 2017 | 10:40 AMMel Cooke
Last week's Mas Camp, Kingston, leg of Chronixx's Chronology tour, made a huge impact, not only in terms of the audience turnout, but also his performance. And that goes not only for him but Protoje as well, both putting on extended showings with...
Published:Wednesday | December 6, 2017 | 1:46 PMMel Cooke
Live Wyya never intended to be a 'backing band' - providing music for vocalists at concert appearances - in the long term. Co-founder, bass guitarist Carl 'C-Wyya' Edwards, said doing that was a strategy to get to perform their own music,...
Published:Tuesday | December 5, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
The drive-in movie may have died in Jamaica when Hurricane Ivan wrecked Palace Amusement's Harbour View open-air cinema. However, GT Taylor, organiser of the annual Christmas Extravaganza large-scale concert in St Elizabeth, is offering a drive-in...
Published:Sunday | November 26, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
In his paintings of poets now mounted in the entrance level of the UWI's Regional Headquarters at the Mona Campus, Dr Earl McKenzie did not try to replicate the features of the men and women of verse."They are not identical, but more imaginative. It...
Published:Wednesday | November 15, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Based on previous stagings of the E. Desmond Lee Africa World Documentary Film Festival (AWDFF), Dr Rachel Mosley-Wood can confidently forecast the attendance pattern at the 2017 renewal. It begins today at the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre,...
Published:Sunday | November 12, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
On Saturday night, Sanchez sang for his school, St Andrew Technical High, and his school put a song in his heart with an unexpected award for 30 years of musical excellence. A banner proclaiming the landmark was held on stage for the appreciable and...
Published:Friday | November 3, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
Al Green, the soulful voice of For The Good Times and Love and Happiness, who turned a preacher man and gospel singer, was a favourite of a very young George Nooks. He was so enthused that as a schoolboy he...
Published:Friday | November 3, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
A walk down Charlotte Street, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in June 2017 was an aural trek through Jamaican popular music. From Tony Gregory's Gypsy to Gyptian's Hold You, songs by Tarrus Riley, Vybz Kartel, and Konshens, among others, Jamaican music...
Published:Thursday | November 2, 2017 | 12:00 AMMel Cooke
It would be remiss of me to not remind those who would forget (deliberately or otherwise), as we often do when people have done good but remember mishaps readily, or simply do not know of Worrell King's efforts to preserve Peter Tosh's presence in...
