Sharon Gordon
jamaica-gleaner.com
Queen Ifrica has been in the spotlight a lot these days from promoting her debut VP Records release, Montego Bay, to voicing her forthright and unwavering stance against a lot of what is happening in the entertainment industry and popular culture in Jamaica and her assessment of how it affects the diaspora.
Queen Ifrica is a tiny woman, but her passion is gargantuan. Read more…
Brian Bonito
jamaica-gleaner.com
When Bob Marley and the Wailers released Babylon By Bus in 1978 – a live album recorded in Paris – the reggae superstar was depicting how he and the group travelled while on tour.
But in Jamaica, there were other vehicles that played an important role in the Reggae king’s sojourn. Read more…
Rob Kenner
nytimes.com
Sara Brittany Somerset
LAST month, inside a sprawling new tourist resort on the Montego Bay coast, Tarrus Riley did the near impossible: He and his seven-piece band, anchored by the Jamaican saxophone virtuoso Dean Fraser, transformed an antiseptic, fluorescent-lighted, air-conditioned hotel ballroom into a sweaty reggae dance party. Mr. Riley, a 30-year-old Rastafarian singer-songwriter, was celebrating the imminent release of his third album, “Contagious” (VP Records), a diverse collection of songs that reveal the complexity and richness of a genre often dismissed as monotonous. Read more…
Jason Miller
thestar.com
At age 59, Marcia Griffiths says most people would call her brand of reggae “old school,” but she’s quick to add that “it’s the good school. Bob Marley’s work will never go in vain.” Read more…
Greg Quill
thestar.com
Sibbles sees rocksteady revival, hopes new documentary will follow trail blazed by the Buena Vista Social Club.
Leroy Sibbles (holding guitar) is performing with the original members of his Toronto band at Harbourfront Centre’s Island Soul Festival.
Leroy Sibbles is no stranger to Toronto reggae fans. He spent more than a decade among us in the 1970s and ’80s trying to establish a beachhead for a career liftoff in North America and Europe, and managed, along with the likes of Stranger Cole and other expats living and working out of the Jamaican enclave here, to extend reggae’s appeal in new and interesting ways.
Long since repatriated in Kingston, the Jamaican music legend and 1987 Juno Award winner is hoping the new Swiss-Canadian music documentary, Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae, will work the same magic for him and the other surviving stars of the short-lived rocksteady movement that Wim Wenders’ film, The Buena Vista Social Club, did for Cuba’s all-but-forgotten champions of traditional, pre-revolution Afro-Cuban music.
“That’s the whole idea: to boost interest in the music that bridged ska and reggae in the mid-1960s, and maybe to prolong our careers, in the same way as similar movies have for other musicians,” Sibbles said earlier this week over the phone from London, where he has been recording interviews and live music performances for the BBC. Read more…
