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ENTITY · MUSIC ORGANISATION OR INSTITUTION

Jamaica Sound System Federation

Probable

A grassroots trade body for sound system owners, operators and selectors, registered as a non-profit and run out of 13 Minott Terrace, off Chisholm Avenue in St Andrew, which is also the yard of Tony Myers's Jam One sound. Myers is its founding chairman, and the federation reflects what he does for a living. He builds and repairs the boxes, cases and amplification that other people's sounds run on, so the organisation sits at the point where the culture is physically made rather than at the point where it is booked.

Its stated purpose is to develop and promote sound system culture and to give the people inside it a supporting voice, and the yard takes visitors, who get shown how a set is built and put on the microphone. Recent scholarship lists it alongside the Sound System Association of Jamaica and JAPPS as one of the three bodies still representing the trade.

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At a glance

Confidence
Probable
Sources
Jamaica Gleaner, Mel Cooke, "No music business without sound systems: Tony Myers keeps Jam One, others in shape" (21 March 2018), read through the Wayback Machine, which photographs and names Myers as chairman at the Minott Terrace base; Backayard Magazine, Amilcar Lewis, "The Jamaican Sound System Federation", which describes the yard, the house sound and the visitor tours; Sonic Street Technologies, Cork, Howard and Stanley Niaah, "How Jamaica's Sound System Industry Organised Itself" (22 February 2022).

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Compiled and researched by The Jamaica Music Atlas music desk. The sources that informed it are credited above.

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