The birth of ska

Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's studio and label at 13 Brentford Road, Kingston — the closest thing Jamaican music has to a foundation. From 1963 onward it moved through ska, rocksteady and early reggae, and the rhythms cut in its rooms became the raw material for everything after: the Studio One catalogue is versioned, toasted over and sampled to this day, and a working knowledge of it is effectively a working knowledge of the music. Its house bands (the Skatalites, later Sound Dimension) and its roll of first recordings — The Wailers, Alton Ellis, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown, Marcia Griffiths, Horace Andy and many more — make it the single most connected node in this archive. Officially the Jamaican Recording and Publishing Studio, it was built out of a former nightclub at 13 Brentford Road in Cross Roads, which Dodd acquired in 1962 and converted with his father's help — the first Black-owned recording studio in Jamaica. The address served as studio, label headquarters and shopfront at once, which is what earned it the "Motown of Jamaica" comparison. Days before Dodd's death in May 2004 the Jamaican government renamed Brentford Road as Studio One Boulevard.

The Skatalites' trombonist (1932-1969) and ska's greatest composer — "Man in the Street", "Eastern Standard Time" and dozens more, played with a melancholy that stood apart from the music's bounce. Schooled at Alpha Boys School, he was among the most gifted musicians Jamaica produced. In 1965 he killed his partner, the dancer Marguerita Mahfood, was committed to Bellevue asylum, and died there in 1969 — a tragedy that shadows the whole ska story.

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.

Jamaica became independent from Britain on 6 August 1962, and the music was central to how that was marked and understood. Ska was the sound of the moment — fast, brass-led and confident — and the Festival Song Competition began four years later to give the anniversary an annual song. Independence gives the archive its central date: the point at which a colonial music market becomes a national one.

The house band that gave ska its shape — a working group of Jamaica's finest jazz-schooled players, most of them alumni of the Alpha Boys School, assembled around 1964 and cutting the instrumental and backing sessions that defined Studio One's era. Tommy McCook, Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso, Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, Lester Sterling, Jah Jerry, Jackie Mittoo, Lloyd Brevett and Lloyd Knibb between them played on an enormous share of the period's records. The original band lasted only about fourteen months before splintering, but its playing underpins the entire ska canon.

How a handful of session players shaped record after record.

Many of reggae's most durable solo careers started in someone else's harmony stack.

Archival labels did not make the music, but they decided which of it the world could hear, and their sleeve notes became the first real scholarship the records ever had.

In Jamaica's foundation years the man who paid for the session owned the sound - and often the shop, the studio and the label too.