Friday, February 02, 2007
 
THE SNIPER
DRUM SONG
CHAMPION OF THE ARENA
Jackie Mittoo
Champion in the Arena 1976-1977
Blood and Fire : 2003
[Buy It]

My friend BJ came over the other night; we sat around listening to Jackie Mittoo. BJ and I both love Jamaican music, but while I'm heavily into the sixties stuff - Toots, Prince Buster, the Skatellites - and think that, say, the stuff Bob Marley's best-known for pales in comparison to the tracks he recorded at Studio One - and am more or less an idiot when it comes to the seventies stuff, BJ's the other way around.

So anyway, we played some Toots, but kept coming back to Jackie Mittoo.

"It's like when he sets the rhythm with his left hand, eveyone else is so deeply in that groove," BJ said.

"To me, it sounds more like Mittoo's just dancing, swirling around it," I said.

"So, I'm saying that Mittoo's the canal, or the lock, and everything else you hear is the ships passing through it," BJ said. "And you're saying the band is the ship and Mittoo is dolphins circling it."

"It's swirl," I said.

"But it's got to do with shipping," BJ said. "And dolphins."

Then we listened to another album - a compilation of songs Jamaican expats recorded in Toronto in the sixties and seventies:

THE FUGITIVE SONG
Jo-Jo and the Fugitive
Cobra : 1968
GRAND FUNK
Jackie Mittoo
Summus : 1971
I WISH IT WOULD RAIN
The Cougars
Previously Unreleased
All available on: Jamaica to Toronto 1967-1974
Light in The Attic : 2006
[Buy It]

"It's not even reggae," BJ said.

"It's like they came to Toronto and were like, oh this is what they're playing up here? Let's play the fuck out of that! And so they did and blew everyone else away."

"In Toronto, anyway."

I'm not sure why, but I punched BJ just then, and when BJ punched me back he broke my nose. There was a lot of blood. But we weren't really getting to the bottom of things, anyway.

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posted by Alex
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