Penny Reel: Late Night Blues

One hears much these days from various and often not entirely disinterested parties of the great and significant advances made in the field of reggae music in recent years; of its pervasive influence on much of the contemporary dance scene and of its ever growing universal appeal.
Evidence is cited to support this contention that on the face of it presents a very convincing case.
We learn for example that the ubiquitous urban rap with the hip hop beat has its antecedents in reggae toasting of the early school, even though it might equally be said that U Roy, Count Matchuki, King Stitt and the rest originally lift many of their own catchphrases verbatim from US radio jocks broadcasting in the Fifties, or even that performers such as the Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron portray their bleak visions of the American ghettoes in its own explicit language a good while before these Jamaican preachers make their presence felt in any way.
We are told too of the weird and mostly wondrous effect that dub techniques first pioneered in four track Kingston studios now have on defining the technological New Age enlightenment in all its ambient manifestations of inner space, while on the flip side of the same roots reggae coin is the sudden emergence of any number of dubious record labels busily collating onto compact disc scratchy vinyl recordings of newly discovered reggae legends for their expanding Eastern European and Far East markets, though with little visible benefit to the artists concerned as far as can be ascertained.
Closely aligned to all this is the roots and culture movement centred on Jah Shaka sound system and his many imitators, attracting audiences of different races in a not altogether unlikely alliance of dreadlock and crustie, while at the other end of the social scale we witness an entertainer like veteran Jamaican jazz guitarist and ska pioneer Ernest Ranglin playing Ronnie Scott to a polite and musically sophisticated yet almost exclusively European crowd.
I could reiterate at length other examples that apparently prove this same assimilative process. Clearly, it would seem, a hitherto much maligned music has finally succeeded in broaching all barriers and is now accepted on its own terms by the world at large, much as the pundits claim..!

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