And this week on Genelec Music Channel,
it's turn for Jamaican music
Deep stuff
Jamaican music scene is legendary, 
it's been going on for a long time and it never tires out
It's amazing, it's an island
Population is a little bit bigger than Finland
and it just keeps pushing out music
Incredible amount of music year after year,
and if you think how much it's influenced the rest of the world's music
It's mind-blowing,
it's like you could basically tell that hip hop or rap has its origins in Jamaican sound system clashes
And there was a lot of Jamaican people living in the Bronx who started doing that
And kind of like morphed into that
And nowadays,
it's the dancehall that is the number one thing
Dancehall started as a very crude and rude kind of art form,
very dangerous, very macho kind of thing
And now it's forming into pop
They're using the autotune and all that which I personally hate,
but it's
But it also has respect for the old music,
for the old musicians
It's pretty nuts,
it's if you just tour around there a little bit you can see
Small bars, restaurants and it's like
'Tomorrow Yellowman'
'Tomorrow The Aggrovators'
You know,
it's like all those guys are still making a living over there
And those who made it big they left the island,
most of them
They all live in Miami nowadays,
which is a little bit sad and
But also at the same time you look at the people, 
the famous people who got murdered over there
Over the years because they become targets because they have money because
The island is so poor,
then you understand why they wanna leave
And there's the different parts of the island you know
St. Andrews is a fertile, beautiful place
And Kingston is,
there's still record stores over there
They are still fighting, the small vinyl stores,
they're still sticking to it
So that not everything goes into streaming and
We found Earl "Chinna" Smith from there,
who's a
Basically a legend,
played on over two thousand recordings
Was the Black Ark Studios',
Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio's house guitar player
Played with Bob Marley,
played with everybody over there
And he took us into his to his house
and he has these porch jams
Where everybody can come and they start jamming
and they jam from sunrise till sunset
He said after sunset,
then they leave the neighbors alone
And it's a pretty cool way of jamming,
he has an old Rock-Ola Jukebox next to his chair
And he picks a 45 from there
and puts it on and we listen to the song
And then he goes: 'You got the song down?'
Like: 'Yeah, I got it'
And then we play
We did that for about five or six hours that afternoon and people kept coming in and lighting up and
You play a drum and la-di-da,
so for me it was like
You know Christmas, absolutely
So I got to play those songs that I've known all my life,
as a bass player reggae is pretty damn important
If you're a bass player,
and I got to play a lot of those songs
Jolly Boys, I've seen the video,
the Amy Winehouse cover
Ain't going to the rehab no no no,
that song and
I just cracked up when I saw it,
it was a bunch of 80-year-old dudes who were saying that they don't want to go to rehab
And they did it in the mento style
Which is like the mother of all Jamaican music,
kind of everything comes from mento
Then I did some research on them and it turns out that Errol Flynn gave them the name,
so I was like 'Okay this thing deepens'
And I happen to go on vacation to Jamaica about a year before our trip over there
And I went to St. Andrews and that hotel where I stayed was owned by a group of guys
Who also own a recording studio and who also happen to manage Jolly Boys
So when we started going,
when we started heading to Jamaica to do the episode
I called those guys up
GeeJam Studios and GeeJam Productions and
They basically hooked me up with everything and of course I wanted to have Jolly Boys in because
Mento is the mother of all Jamaican music and they are the greatest representatives of it all and
They hooked us up with a really great fixer with Carly and Samuels and
I expected Jamaica to be one of the more difficult ones to fix and
You know it's very laid-back over there,
so I didn't think everything was gonna run on time
Boy was I wrong, I was big-time wrong,
sorry about that
It's, everything went like clock work,
they did amazing thing
People were more polite and nice than I could have ever imagined and,
musicians as well
And especially the Jolly Boys, I got
Johnny the mento box player,
he built me a little mento box so I got one at home now
Kabaka Pyramid is among like Protoje and Chronixx
And yeah, there's a whole kind of like young conscious reggae movement
Who's doing the old school reggae,
but also mixing it up with kind of new school stuff
And there's Jah9, 
yeah Jah9, Protoje, Kabaka Pyramid
And we managed to get Kabaka Pyramid for the program
We threw out basically all those names,
I really wanted to have Jah9 because I really dug her
First record you know that debut album
Because she's really doing something different and there hasn't really been,
in that genre
Like conscious reggae political lyrics,
and spiritual lyrics
There really hasn't been that many female artists,
so I really wanted to have her on it
And Kabaka Pyramid came in that same kind of research thing,
once I started listening to his first album
I needed to have him on the program,
he's a very powerful guy
Who's very,
you know unforgiving with what he says and
And it's a good thing that young people keep the,
kind of like the Bob Marley's tradition and Peter Tosh's tradition alive
That you talk about the social ills and
Talk about what's wrong with where you live, through music,
and try to uplift people that way
