Orange Street to North Parade: Kingston's record district

Downtown Kingston record shop opened by producer Winston Riley around 1971 at Chancery Lane, off North Parade, doubling as the retail front and A&R base for his Techniques label; Riley ran it until his death in 2012 and dreamed of turning it into a museum.

Jamaica pressed its own records from the late 1950s — Federal, Dynamic, Tuff Gong and a ring of smaller plants — which is a large part of why its record culture could move so fast: a rhythm cut on Monday could be on a stamper by midweek and in the dance by the weekend, with no overseas round trip. Most of that capacity is gone; Tuff Gong's plant survives.

Prince Buster's landmark record shop on Orange Street ('Beat Street') in downtown Kingston, later the International Record Shack at #127, a fixture of the street that was once the mecca of Jamaican music. It served as retail and distribution outlet for Buster's own productions. Source note: Discogs (Prince Buster Records Shack), Tallawah and Jamaica Gleaner.

The downtown Kingston blocks around North Parade that held Randy's Record Mart and its upstairs studio (Studio 17), along with a cluster of shops and distributors. Randy's later became VP Records after the Chin family emigrated — one of the direct lines from the Kingston retail trade to reggae's global distribution.

Kingston record retailer whose 125 King Street premises incubated a generation of shop-owners: he offered the space that became Derrick Harriott's first One Stop shop and was linked to Herman Chin-Loy's early One Stop venture, making King Street a seedbed of the island's record trade.

Downtown Kingston's record trade, known as Beat Street: Prince Buster's Record Shack, Beverley's and a dense run of shops, labels and producers within a few hundred yards. For decades a record could be cut, pressed, sold and made famous inside that stretch — the commercial heart of the business.

King Street, downtown Kingston's grand commercial boulevard, whose department stores and arcades hosted a cluster of record shops from the 1950s — including the 125 King Street address that seeded Derrick Harriott's and Herman Chin-Loy's One Stop ventures — before the trade's centre shifted to Orange Street and North Parade.

Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd's Kingston record shop, sited on Orange Street at the corner of Charles Street, which distributed his output across imprints including Coxsone, Downbeat, All Stars and Muzik City. The multiple labels helped spread Studio One's prolific output and reportedly confounded radio DJs. Source note: Tallawah 'Orange Street Remembrance' and United Reggae.

Augustus Pablo's record shop at 135 Orange Street, Kingston, and the retail face of his Rockers International label — the oldest surviving record shop on the strip and a destination for collectors of roots, rocksteady and dancehall vinyl from around the world. Shops like it were not only outlets but filters and meeting points: where a producer sold his own pressings, where selectors heard what was new, and where a record's reputation was made. Pablo founded it with his brother Garth Swaby to sell the family's own productions, and it is kept today by his son Addis Pablo with Ainsworth "Mitchie" Williams behind the counter. The founding year is unsettled — the archive's editor gives 1976, LargeUp 1978 and The Vinyl Factory 1979 — and no start date is recorded here until a source close to the shop settles it. The address had music in it before Rockers arrived: 135-135A Orange Street was Leslie Kong's Beverley's, record shop and ice-cream parlour, until his death in 1971.

How Kingston's record shops, and their heirs in London and New York, worked as A&R desk, bank, distributor and meeting point for Jamaican music.

In Jamaica and the diaspora, the retail counter was the A&R department.

Every great Jamaican deejay of the 1960s and 70s served an apprenticeship on a named sound system.

Rastafari drumming came down from the Wareika Hills and onto record while colonial-era radio kept its distance.