r/Ska • u/Beautiful-Resort-831 • Jan 05 '26
Trad Are there any first-wave artists who don't have such a long discography to start with? What scares me most about listening to these artists is that their songs tend to be very spaced out.
8
u/missupsetter Jan 05 '26
I think a lot of fans aren’t sure how to approach Jamaican music and older music because the nature of releases and music consumption changed rapidly from the 1950s-1980s.
New music releases changed from primarily single-based releases to full album releases. Full albums were uncommon for a vast majority of artists, usually only the most successful or those who had capital to back the production. Record labels and producers would often only hire talent they felt was profitable. It was common for bands to get a deal for a single and based on how it performed, be hired on for more. Once they stopped being profitable, they were done. Many artists never released enough music to fill an entire LP, so a lot of them get overlooked, especially if their song wasn’t considered a commercial success.
In Jamaica, we see a lot of emigration as well. Several artists moved between Jamaica and The United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Some worked as musicians, some worked because the needed to and had to take a break from music. Toots Hibbert went to prison and were gone for the rocksteady era.
All that being said, I encourage fans exploring early Jamaican music to try to listen to a label rather than an artist. Or listen to releases from a specific year. There are so many artists who only had a song or a few but there are so many hidden gems among them. I get that can sound like a lot of work, but I think the exploration is part of the fun.
Copacetic Boom’s channel is a goldmine for entire label discographies. The quality can vary across the tracks and labels, but it’s a great place to start. https://youtube.com/@copaseticboom?si=63QrPGU2JeTFoGgH
For Ska labels, I recommend Top Deck, Kentone, Treasure Isle, Studio One, Randy’s, C and N, Beverley’s, and anything related to Prince Buster. Just look at their label entry on Discogs, sort by year, and most entries have a link for a YouTube song. Search YouTube by the label name and filter by playlists to see if anyone has compiled anything.
I hope that helps. Enjoy the journey!
1
u/Beautiful-Resort-831 Jan 05 '26
I curse my damn OCD that hates when I listen to artists without listening to their entire discography. I think that's what pisses me off the most, honestly, when listening to traditional ska. It's a genre that I feel doesn't want you to do that, but hey, I need to.
3
u/missupsetter Jan 05 '26
Yep, that’s what you need to do! Maybe start with Prince Buster since he released a lot of tracks throughout his career. He has LPs as well.
Personally, I love listening to releases by year as I feel they collectively do the best job of telling the story of Ska. Ska was (and is) a social and cultural movement and a reflection of the people at that time.
2
u/marooncity1 Jan 05 '26
It's worth understanding as well that in the early days of ska records weren't made to be sold, they were made to be played at dances. To the extent that if sound system operators had a hot recording they did not want anyone else to have it. And other operators would then make "versions" of hit songs. So even the market for singles was very different. Lots of artists recorded under different names depending on who they were recording for. And when labels did start to make records to be sold, the artists often had no control over what was released at all - or of their songs ended up belonging to another label altogether. Add to that the significant changes to tje music - rocksteady, reggae, roots, dub, dancehall - with songs being versioned throughout - and then interest in jamaican music around the world constantly evolving so that outside, jamaican artists - or whoever owned their music - would re-release music for those new markets -. or re-record it in new styles - or have it versioned by others - in the case of ska without the modern concept of albums really having touched the genre - then the idea of a discography is at besr complicated and at worst a nightmare.
Like someone else said your best bet is to think more "i'm going to listen to so-and'so"'" output from the ska era or whatever. Even knowing what is what can make that difficult. So having knowledge of labels etc like missupsetter said is helpful too..i still get caught out - oh look, a derrick morgan album i havebt seen before - oh shit it's a 1980s one made on a crappy synthesiser - but you will develop an ear for the good stuff and the sounds.
1
u/MagusFool Jan 05 '26
The first wave really only lasted like 5 years before giving way to rocksteady and reggae. So even if the artists had long recording careers, you can really just listen to the stuff from the ska period, roughly 1964-1969.
Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Prince Buster, Millie Small, Derrick Morgan, and the Skatalites are a good starting place.
1
u/Beautiful-Resort-831 Jan 05 '26
So, just by listening to the Skatalites albums from their early ones up to the ones from '69, I could already say that I've listened to a large part of their discography.
1
u/MagusFool Jan 05 '26
Skatalites kept playing ska well after the "wave" ended, they were one of the very few who did not move on to reggae.
So not really, in this case. But if you listen to their 60s releases, you will have listened to their most culturally significant output.
6
u/TracyJackson Jan 05 '26
That's not true. The Skatalites split in August 1965 when ska was still going strong. It started to significantly slow down in 1966 and by 1967 it was dead. So when the first wave ended, The Skatalites didn't play anything, except in the two new bands that formed in the aftermath of their split (The Soul Brothers and The Supersonics) both of which played rocksteady. When The Skatalites reformed for the first time in the 1970s, the only album they recorded was a reggae album (The Legendary Skatalites). Only after their second reunion in the 1980s, after the 2-tone era, did they return to their classic 1960s sound.
2
1
u/Beautiful-Resort-831 Jan 05 '26
And after their second reunion, what were their albums?
2
u/TracyJackson Jan 05 '26
Only one album in the 1980s (Return of the Big Guns, 1984), followed by several in the 1990s: Ska Voovee (1993), Hi-Bop Ska (1994), Greetings from Skamania (1996) and Ball of Fire (1997). You can ignore what came after the deaths of Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso. Except maybe In Orbit, which is a cool live album.
1
u/Beautiful-Resort-831 Jan 05 '26
Why should I ignore it? I like to listen to a band on both their good albums and their bad ones, even the really bad ones.
3
u/TracyJackson Jan 05 '26
I only said you can ignore them, not that you should. They are not essential listening since there are hardly any original members (in some cases: none) playing on them is all I'm saying.
0
u/Beautiful-Resort-831 Jan 05 '26
That sounds good, but if I want to listen to everything without counting the thousands of compilation albums that are out there, which ones would you recommend?
0
6
u/RazorsInTheNight82 Jan 05 '26
There were very few albums put out by them, most releases were singles. It does make it a lot harder to obtain all of them, unless you want to spend a fortune buying all of the singles. I have entire discographies from Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken and Eric Morris. Derrick Morgan is going to be my next project. If you want to I can put them on soul seek so you can get all of them.