Innovationwithin the Music Industry Dissertation

Innovationwithin the Music Industry - Dissertation Example Compared with rock music, reggae music basically inverted the role of bass and guitar: the former was the lead, the latter beat the typical hiccupping pattern. The paradox of reggae, of course, is that this music "unique to Jamaica" is actually not Jamaican at all, having its foundations in the USA and Africa. (.www.history-of-rock-music.com/age/Reggae.php - 6k -) Post World War II saw the emergence of various Caribbean music forms, notably steel-pan music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the late '40s and early '50s, Jamaican musicians began combining the steel-pan and calypso strains with an indigenous mento beat (e.g. Harry Belafonte - Jamaica Farewell). During the 1950s Jamaican youth was turning away from the American pop foisted on them by Radio Jamaica Rediffusion (RJR) and the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). Weather conditions permitting they listened instead to the sinewy music being played on New Orleans stations or Miami's powerful WINZ, whose playlists included records by Amos Milburn, Rosco Gordon, and Louis Jordan. Significant New Orleans artists of the time included Fats Domino, Jelly Roll Morton, Champion Jack Dupree, and Professor Longhair. It is surmised that the delay effects which are an important part of the reggae/dub sound may have initially been inspired by the oscillations in the signal from these far away radio stations. During this period, Jamaican bands began covering U.S. R&B hits, but the more adventurous took the nuts and bolts of the sound and melded them with energetic jazz conceits - particularly in the ever-present horn section - and emerged around 1956 with a hybrid concoction christened ska. Ernest Ranglin, the stellar jazz-rooted Jamaican guitarist who backed up the Wailers on such ska classics as "Love and Affection" and "Cry to Me," says that the word was coined by musicians "to talk about the skat! skat! skat! scratchin' guitar strum that goes behind." Practically overnight, ska spawned a major Jamaican industry, the Sound System, whereby enterprising record shop D.J.'s with reliable U.S. connections for 45's would load a pair of hefty P.A. speakers into a pickup truck and tour the island from hilltop to savanna, spinning the latest hits. D.J.'s also gave themselves comic book nom de plumes like Prince Buster and Sir Coxsone Downbeat.