Ska

The first distinctly Jamaican popular form, emerging around 1960 out of mento, Jamaican rhythm and blues and the American R&B the sound systems had been importing. Its signature is the accent thrown onto the offbeat, the guitar and piano chop that inverts the pulse of the music it came from, carried over a walking bass and a horn front line.

Ska belongs to the independence years and sounds like them: fast, brass-led and forward-leaning. It slowed into rocksteady around 1966. Nobody agrees on where its name came from, and the disagreement is itself part of the record: bassist Cluett Johnson's exclamation "Skavoovie!" is one account; pianist Theophilus Beckford's claim that crowds shouted the same word at his 1959 "Easy Snappin'" is another; a widely repeated story has Coxsone Dodd coaching guitarist Ernie Ranglin to "play it ska...

ska... ska..." on the offbeat; and a fourth credits the uptown bandleader Byron Lee with coining "ska" as a tidier alternative to the "staya... staya..." some West Kingston studios used instead. All four are sincerely held and none is provable, in a scene where, as soon as three people heard a new sound, two of them had already copied it.