This is the first book-length study of dub poetry, the musical talkover that has been an important part of the reggae scene in Canada, Britain and of course the Caribbean since the 1970's. Christian Habekost 's qualifications for writing such a book are beyond dispute. He is a German poet who has been involved with the dub movement since it began and knows most of its leading figures. As Ranting Chako, he is featured on the LP Dread Poets Society. The bibliography indicates that he has interviewed many of the 43 poet-performers mentioned, often on several occasions. Verbal Riddim, based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Mannheim, is a successful blend of the performer and the researcher.

Billy Martin, aka illy B, is a remarkable drummer, visual artist, and label owner who has successfully carved out his own musical path. As the organic beat-maker for Medeski, Martin & Wood, Martin has successfully blended world-music cultures in to his own unique style. The claves in this book open up rhythmic subdivisions, substitutions, and a much wider vocabulary to draw upon than just playing static beats. Call them systems, bell patterns, or claves, but be assured that there is much freedom to be gained from owning these riddims.

Jamaican music can be roughly divided into four eras, each with a distinctive beat - ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall. Ska dates from about 1960 to mid-1966, rocksteady from 1966 to 1968, while from 1969 to 1983 reggae was the popular beat. The reggae era had two phases, 'early reggae' up to 1974 and 'roots reggae' up to 1983. Since 1983 dancehall has been the prevalent sound. The authors describe each stage in the development of the music, identifying the most popular songs and artists, highlighting the significant social, political and economic issues as they affected the musical scene. While they write from a Jamaican perspective, the intended audience is 'any person, local or foreign, interested in an intelligent discussion of reggae music and Jamaica.'.

Once a central concept in anthropology, syncretism has recently re-emerged as a valuable tool for understanding the complex dynamics of ethnicity, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Building on a century-long tradition of scholarship, this important book formulates a broader view of the mixing and interpenetration of religious beliefs and practices, primarily from Africa and Europe, highlighting the ways in which religions and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic have been assimilated and innovatively changed. Divided into four sections, the book focuses on religious syncretism in Brazil, Jamaica, and other parts of the Caribbean and West Africa. Greenfield and Droogers have brought together an array of outstanding international scholars whose rich and varied essays on specific geographical locales and customs comprise an innovative and comprehensive view of the transference of religious traditions and their continuity and reformulation on two continents.

Longlisted: 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Bob Marley is dead. The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered. The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars. The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians. It is hard to imagine worse times. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica's nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor's palace in Addis Ababa and Zion. There is even a fallen angel. At its heart are the human stories of the deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island's dead. There is also the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766. The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. Not least of the novel's marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation.

Vibe Merchants offers an insider’s perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

An ethnography of Dancehall, the dominant form of reggae music in Jamica since the early 1960s.