Ska

By the late 1950s, Kingston's sound systems were running on American rhythm and blues, much of it from New Orleans. When fresh records of that kind became harder to find, rival operators Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid and Prince Buster started recording Jamaican musicians instead, and from 1959 those sessions reached the street on 7-inch singles.^[1][2]

What came out of those studios was no longer R&B. The American shuffle met mento, the island's rural dance music, and the guitar began hitting the offbeat with a short, clipped stroke, the sound most accounts credit with giving the style its name. Horns and piano doubled that figure on the weak beat while the drums held the time.^[1]

When Jamaica became independent in 1962, ska was already the sound of the island's dances, and Derrick Morgan marked the moment with “Forward March”. Two years later, players who had been recording for Dodd, Reid and Buster formed The Skatalites and debuted at the Hi-Hat Club in Rae Town. Jazz-trained horn players such as Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso and Don Drummond gave the studios a house band. The original group played its last show in August 1965, having backed almost everyone in the meantime, including The Wailers on their debut single, “Simmer Down”.^[1][2]

Some of those singles were already crossing the Atlantic. Laurel Aitken, a Cuban-born singer raised in Jamaica, moved to Brixton in 1960. After his “Lonesome Lover” did well for Emil Shalit's Melodisc, the company set up an imprint devoted to Jamaican music, Blue Beat, where Aitken cut fifteen singles before returning to Jamaica in 1963.^[1][2]

The label's name stuck to the sound. In Britain, “bluebeat” became the catch-all term for Jamaican pop of the period, including records that never appeared on Blue Beat, and it found an audience among mods and, later in the decade, the first skinheads.^[1]

In 1964 ska scored its first major international hit, recorded in London. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell produced Millie Small's “My Boy Lollipop”, arranged by the Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin. It reached number two in both Britain and the United States and sold more than seven million copies.^[1]

Fifteen years later the music returned to the British charts through a generation raised in English cities. In Coventry, an industrial city in the Midlands, keyboardist Jerry Dammers formed The Specials in 1977 as a deliberately multiracial band. Dammers wanted something like an English Motown, and in 1979 he launched the 2 Tone label with backing from Chrysalis.^[1][2]

The first single paired The Specials' “Gangsters” with “The Selecter”, an instrumental recorded in 1977 by Coventry musicians. Within two months “Gangsters” had reached number six, and the instrumental's author, Neol Davies, put together a band under the same name. Before 1979 was out, the label had also issued “The Prince”, the debut by London's Madness and a tribute to the Prince Buster song that gave them their name, and “Tears of a Clown” by Birmingham's The Beat, another number six.^[1][2][3]

2 Tone played Jamaican ska with punk's speed and guitars, and its mixed line-ups were a stand against racism in a country with high unemployment and rising racial tension. In 1981 “Ghost Town”, which Dammers wrote about unemployment and the closure of Coventry's clubs, went to number one in the same summer that riots broke out in London and Liverpool.^[1][2]

2 Tone records reached the United States alongside British punk, and bands in the hardcore clubs began adding horns and offbeat guitar. In Boston, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones had been mixing ska and hardcore since the 1980s. In Berkeley, Operation Ivy lasted only from 1987 to 1989, played often at the 924 Gilman Street collective and left a single album, “Energy”, which was enough to make them a touchstone of ska punk. Two members, Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman, went on to form Rancid.^[1][2]

By the mid-1990s the sound had left the underground. No Doubt's “Tragic Kingdom”, released by the Anaheim band in 1995, sold more than 16 million copies and pushed labels to sign other ska acts. The Bosstones reached radio in 1997 with “The Impression That I Get”, and bands such as Less Than Jake and Reel Big Fish were filling venues across the country. By the early 2000s many of those groups had split, and ska punk went back underground.^[1][2]

While American ska punk was still taking shape, ska was picking up other languages. 1985 produced three bands that would make it part of Latin American rock: Los Fabulosos Cadillacs in Buenos Aires, Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio in Mexico City, formed in the year of the earthquake that devastated the city, and Desorden Público in Caracas.^[1][2]

Each mixed ska with what was around it. The Cadillacs folded in rock, salsa and Latin rhythms, and “Matador”, from 1993's “Vasos Vacíos”, topped charts across Spanish-speaking America. Maldita brought ska into the centre of Mexican rock, and “El Circo” (1991) became the best-selling rock album in the country's history. In Spain, Ska-P, formed in Madrid's Vallecas district in 1994, turned ska punk into a vehicle for openly anti-establishment lyrics.^[1][2][3][4]

Also in 1985, Asa-Chang gathered more than ten musicians from Tokyo's underground into the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. They started out playing in the street, blended ska with jazz and Latin music, and released their first LP in 1990 as a vinyl-only 12-inch. After signing to Sony they played the Budokan to more than 10,000 people.^[1]

In Brazil, ska arrived through 1980s rock, and by the British route. Os Paralamas do Sucesso started out as a trio listening to The Police, The Beat and The Specials. After “Cinema Mudo” (1983), their second album, “O Passo do Lui” (1984), included “Óculos”, “Meu Erro” and a track simply called “Ska”, and took them to the first Rock in Rio in 1985.^[1]

In the next decade, Skank formed in Belo Horizonte in 1991, taking their name from the skank, the offbeat guitar pattern of ska and reggae. The original plan was to mix dancehall with Brazilian styles; over time the band moved toward Britpop and Clube da Esquina, the Minas Gerais songwriting tradition. In Brasília, from 1998, Móveis Coloniais de Acaju combined ska, rock and Brazilian music with a horn section of baritone sax, tenor sax and flute, and became one of the leading names of the 2000s independent scene.^[1][2]

Curitiba's Abraskadabra took the route in reverse. Active since 2003, the band plays ska punk with Brazilian touches, first toured the United States in 2014 and signed with Bad Time Records, the American label behind the newest generation of ska bands. Their fourth album, “Pack Your Bags”, was recorded in Gainesville, Florida, with Less Than Jake's Roger Lima producing.^[1]