Reggae
Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use the word "reggae," naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style, influenced by traditional mento as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues the New Orleans R&B practiced by Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint, evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae relates news, social gossip, political comment. Reggae spread into a commercialized jazz field, being known first as ‘Rudie Blues’ ‘Ska’ ‘Blue Beat’, ‘Rock Steady’, it is recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat, the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in rocksteady. Reggae is linked to the Rastafari, an Afrocentric religion which developed in Jamaica in the 1930's, aiming at promoting Pan Africanism.
Soon after the Rastafarian movement appeared, the international popularity of reggae music became associated with and increased the visibility of Rastafarianism spreading the Rastafari gospel throughout the world. Reggae music is an important means of transporting vital messages of Rastafarianism; the musician becomes the messenger, as Rastafarians see it,"the soldier and the musician are tools for change."Stylistically, reggae incorporates some of the musical elements of rhythm and blues, mento and draws influence from traditional African folk rhythms. One of the most recognizable elements is offbeat rhythms; the tempo of reggae is slower paced than ska but faster than rocksteady. The concept of call and response can be found throughout reggae music; the genre of reggae music is led by the bass. Some key players in this sound are Jackie Jackson from Toots and the Maytals, Carlton Barrett from Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lloyd Brevett from The Skatalites, Paul Douglas from Toots and the Maytals, Lloyd Knibb from The Skatalites, Winston Grennan, Sly Dunbar, Anthony "Benbow" Creary from The Upsetters.
The bass guitar plays the dominant role in reggae. The bass sound in reggae is thick and heavy, equalized so the upper frequencies are removed and the lower frequencies emphasized; the guitar in reggae plays on the off beat of the rhythm. It is common for reggae to be sung in Jamaican Patois, Jamaican English, Iyaric dialects. Reggae is noted for its tradition of social criticism and religion in its lyrics, although many reggae songs discuss lighter, more personal subjects, such as love and socializing. Reggae has spread to many countries across the world incorporating local instruments and fusing with other genres. Reggae en Español spread from the Spanish speaking Central American country of Panama to the mainland South American countries of Venezuela and Guyana to the rest of South America. Caribbean music in the United Kingdom, including reggae, has been popular since the late 1960s, has evolved into several subgenres and fusions. Many reggae artists began their careers in the UK, there have been a number of European artists and bands drawing their inspiration directly from Jamaica and the Caribbean community in Europe.
Reggae in Africa was boosted by the visit of Bob Marley to Zimbabwe in 1980. In Jamaica, authentic reggae is one of the biggest sources of income; the 1967 edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English lists reggae as "a estab. Sp. for rege", as in rege-rege, a word that can mean either "rags, ragged clothing" or "a quarrel, a row". Reggae as a musical term first appeared in print with the 1968 rocksteady hit "Do the Reggay" by The Maytals which named the genre of Reggae for the world. Reggae historian Steve Barrow credits Clancy Eccles with altering the Jamaican patois word streggae into reggae. However, Toots Hibbert said: There's a word we used to use in Jamaica called'streggae'. If a girl is walking and the guys look at her and say'Man, she's streggae' it means she don't dress well, she look raggedy; the girls would say that about the men too. This one morning me and my two friends were playing and I said,'OK man, let's do the reggay.' It was just something. So we just start. People tell me that we had given the sound its name.
Before that people had called it blue-beat and all kind of other things. Now it's in the Guinness World of Records. Bob Marley is said to have claimed that the word reggae came from a Spanish term for "the king's music"; the liner notes of To the King, a compilation of Christian gospel reggae, suggest that the word reggae was derived from the Latin regi meaning "to the king". Although influenced by traditional mento and calypso music, as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, reggae owes its direct origins to the ska and rocksteady of 1960s Jamaica; the generic title for Jamaican music recorded between 1961 and 1967, ska emerged from Jamaican R&B, based on American R&B and doo-wop. Rastafari entered some countries through reggae music; the Rastafari moveme
Calypso music
Calypso is a style of Afro-Caribbean music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago during the early to mid-19th century and spread to the rest of the Caribbean Antilles and Venezuela by the mid-20th century. Its rhythms can be traced back to West African Kaiso and the arrival of French planters and their slaves from the French Antilles in the 18th century, it is characterized by rhythmic and harmonic vocals, is most sung in a French creole and led by a griot. As calypso developed, the role of the griot became known as a chantuelle and calypsonian; as English replaced "patois" as the dominant language, calypso migrated into English, in so doing it attracted more attention from the government. It allowed the masses to challenge the doings of the unelected Governor and Legislative Council, the elected town councils of Port of Spain and San Fernando. Calypso continued to play an important role in political expression, served to document the history of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. Calypso in the Caribbean includes a range of genres, including: the Benna in Barbuda.
It is thought that the name "calypso" was "kaiso", now believed to come from Efik "ka isu" and Ibibio "kaa iso", used in urging someone on or in backing a contestant. There is a Trinidadian term "cariso" that means "old-time" calypsos; the term "calypso" is recorded from the 1930s onwards. Alternatively, the insert for The Rough Guide to Calypso and Soca favours John Cowley's arguments in Carnival and Calypso: Traditions in the Making, that the word might be a corruption of the French carrouseaux and through the process of patois and Anglicization became caliso and finally "calypso". Calypso music was developed in Trinidad in the 17th century from the West African Kaiso and canboulay music brought by African slaves imported to that Caribbean island to work on sugar plantations; the slaves, brought to toil on sugar plantations, were stripped of all connections to their homeland and family and not allowed to talk to each other. They used calypso to communicate with each other. Many early calypsos were sung in French Creole by an individual called a griot.
As calypso developed, the role of the griot became known as a chantuelle and calypsonian. Modern calypso, began in the 19th century, a fusion of disparate elements ranging from the masquerade song lavway, French Creole belair and the calinda stick-fighting chantwell. Calypso's early rise was connected with the adoption of Carnival by Trinidadian slaves, including canboulay drumming and the music masquerade processions; the French brought Carnival to Trinidad, calypso competitions at Carnival grew in popularity after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The first identifiably calypso genre song was recorded in 1912, by Lovey's String Band while visiting New York City. In 1914, the second calypso song was recorded, this time in Trinidad, by chantwell Julian Whiterose, better known as the Iron Duke and famous calinda stick-fighter. Jules Sims would record vocal calypsos; the majority of these calypsos of the World War I era were instrumentals by Lovey and Lionel Belasco. Due to the constraints of the wartime economy, no recordings of note were produced until the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the "golden era" of calypso would cement the style and phrasing of the music.
Calypso evolved into a way of spreading news around Trinidad. Politicians and public figures debated the content of each song, many islanders considered these songs the most reliable news source. Calypsonians pushed the boundaries of free speech as their lyrics spread news of any topic relevant to island life, including speaking out against political corruption. British rule enforced censorship and police began to scan these songs for damaging content. With this censorship, calypsos continued to push boundaries, with a variety of ways to slip songs past the scrutinizing eyes of the editor. Double entendre, or double-speak, was one way, as was the practice of denouncing countries such as Hitler's Germany and its annexation of Poland, while making pointed references toward the UK's policies on Trinidad. Sex, gossip, politics, local news and insulting other calypsonians were the order of the day in classic calypso, just as it is today with classic hip-hop, and just as the hip-hop of today, the music sparked shock and outrage in moralistic sections of society.
Countless recordings were dumped at sea in the name of censorship, although in truth, rival US companies did this in the spirit of underhanded competition, claiming that the rivals' material was unfit for US consumption. Decca Records lost untold pressings in this manner, as did RCA's Bluebird label. An entrepreneur named Eduardo Sa Gomes played a significant role in spreading calypso in its early days. Sa Gomes, a Portuguese immigrant who owned a local music and phonograph equipment shop in Port of Spain, promoted the genre and gave financial support to the local artists. In March 1934, he sent Roaring Attila the Hun to New York City to record.
Soca music
Soca music is a genre of music that originated within a marginalized subculture in Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1970s, developed into a range of styles by the 1980s and later. Soca was developed by Lord Shorty in the early 1970s in an effort to revive traditional calypso, the popularity of, flagging amongst younger generations in Trinidad by the start of the 1970s due to the rise in popularity of reggae from Jamaica and soul and funk from USA. Soca is an offshoot of kaiso/calypso, with influences from Latin, cadence and soul. Soca has evolved since the 1980s through musicians from various Anglophone Caribbean countries not only from its birthplace Trinidad and Tobago but from Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Saint Lucia, US and British Virgin Islands, The Bahamas and Belize. There have been significant productions from artists in Venezuela, Panama, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. Soca grew in popularity through the 1970s. Soca's development as a musical genre included its fusion with calypso, soul/funk, Latin and traditional West African rhythms.
A sound project was started in 1970 at KH Studios, Sea Lots in Trinidad, to find a way to record the complex calypso rhythm in a new multi-track era. Musicians involved in the initiative were Robin Imamshah, Angus Nunez, Errol Wise, Vonrick Maynard, Clarence James, Carl Henderson, David Boothman; some of the early songs recorded at the KH Studios that benefited from this recording project are “Indrani” by Lord Shorty and "Calypso Zest" by Sensational Roots both recorded in 1972. Came the soca hits “Endless Vibrations” and “Sweet Music” by Lord Shorty recorded in 1974 and 1975 and “Second Fiddle” by Ella Andall recorded in 1975. In 1976 “Savage” by Maestro and “Trinidad Boogie” by Last Supper benefitted from the improving multi-track recording technology at KH Studios. Soca has grown since its inception to incorporate elements of funk, soul and dance music genres, continues to blend in contemporary music styles and trends. Soca has been experimented with in Bollywood films, Bhangra, in new Punjabi pop, in disco music in the United States.
The "father" of soca was a Trinidadian man named Garfield Blackman who rose to fame as "Lord Shorty" with his 1964 hit "Cloak and Dagger" and took on the name "Ras Shorty I" in the early 1980s. He started out performing in the calypso genre. A prolific musician and innovator, Shorty experimented with fusing calypso and elements of Indo-Caribbean music for nearly a decade from 1965 before unleashing "the soul of calypso", soca music by the early 1970s. Shorty was the first to define his music as "soca" during 1975 when his hit song “Endless Vibrations” was causing major musical waves on radio stations and at parties and clubs not just throughout his native T&T but in far off metropolitan cities like New York and London. Soca was spelled Sokah which stands for the “Soul of Calypso” with the “kah” part being taken from the first letter in the Sanskrit alphabet and representing the Power of movement as well as the East Indian rhythmic influence that helped to inspire the new soca beat. Shorty stated in a number of interviews that the idea for the new soca beat started with the rhythmic fusion of Calypso rhythms with East Indian rhythms that he used in his hit "Indrani" recorded in 1972.
The soca beat was solidified as the popular new beat that most of the T&T Calypso musicians would start adopting by the time Shorty had recorded his big crossover hit “Endless Vibrations” in 1974. Shorty recorded a mid-year album in 1975 called “Love In The Caribbean” that contains a number of crossover soca tracks before setting off on an album distribution and promotion tour. During his 1975 “Love In The Caribbean” album promotion and distribution tour Shorty pass thru the isle of Dominica on his way back to Trinidad and saw Dominica's top band Exile One perform at the Fort Young Hotel. Shorty was inspired to compose and record a Soca and Cadence-lypso fusion track called “E Pete” or “Ou Petit” which can be viewed as the first of its kind in that particular Soca style. Shorty sought and got help with the Creole lyrics he used in the chorus of his “E Pete” song by consulting with Dominica's 1969 Calypso King, Lord Tokyo, two creole lyricists, Chris Seraphine and Pat Aaron while he was in Dominica.
The song “E Pete” thus contains genuine Creole lyrics in the chorus like "Ou dee moin ou petit Shorty", is a combination of Soca, Cadence-lypso and Creole. Shorty's 1974 Endless Vibrations and Soul of Calypso brought Soca to regional and international attention and fame and helped to solidify the growing Soca Movement led by Shorty. Soca means the "Soul of Calypso", but the name has nothing to do with the fusion of American soul music and calypso as soca is rhythmically a fusion of African/calypso rhythms and East Indian rhythms. Soca's history is multi-faceted. Regarding its name, Lord Shorty spelled his musical hybrid as "sokah" and stated in a 1979 interview with Carnival Magazine that "I came up with the name soca. I invented soca, and I never spelt it s-o-c-a. It was s-o-k-a-h to reflect the East Indian influence." The s-o-c-a spelling became the popular spelling after a journalist called Ivor Ferreira interviewed Shorty for an article on his new style of calypso music he was doing, published during the 1976 T&T Carnival season.
The a
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database, similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database, a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, the length of each track; these entries are maintained by volunteer editors. Recorded works can store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata; as of 21 September 2018, MusicBrainz contained information about 1.4 million artists, 2 million releases, 19 million recordings. End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use; as with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data. Cover art is provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this. In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching; this feature allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions.
This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, replacing TRM with MusicDNS. TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND; some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought; the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský. While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not MusicBrainz projects, they are tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second. Additional post-processing is applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns; the AcoustID search server searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers if known.
Since 2003, MusicBrainz's core data are in the public domain, additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL; the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products. In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye. On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their Linkara Música service. On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music Web pages; the BBC online music editors will join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database. On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.
Amarok – KDE audio player Banshee – multi-platform audio player Beets – automatic CLI music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems Clementine – multi-platform audio player CDex – Microsoft Windows CD ripper Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI iEatBrainz – Mac OS X deprecated foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – Music Library/Audio Player Jaikoz – Java mass tag editor Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder Mp3tag – Windows metadata editor and music organizer MusicBrainz Picard – cross-platform album-oriented tag editor MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor puddletag – a tag editor for PyQt under the GPLv3 Rhythmbox music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper Zortam Mp3 Media Studio – Windows music organizer and ID3 Tag Editor. Freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. List of online music databases Making Metadata: The Case of Mus
