Watch How the People Dancing - Unity Sounds From London Dancehall, 1986-1989
Label: Honest Jon's Records UK (originaly released on Unity Sounds)
Catalog#: HJRCD3
Released: 2002
Style: Dub, Dancehall, Reggae
Credits: Artwork & Photography Trevor Lewis, Will Bankhead
Compiled By Mark Ainley, Tom Benson, Mastered By Moritz von Oswald
Producer Red Eye, Ribs, Ruddy Ranks

This excellent set compiles the output of Unity Sounds from the years 1986-89, and is a typically diverse and well selected Honest Jon’s release. Produced in conjunction with the man who started the London based label, Rib’s, Unity Sounds specialised in the mid eighties birth of Dancehall, not the gun toting Hip-Hop influenced Dancehall of modern Jamaica, but sublime digital Reggae that has been hugely influential on artists like Rocker Hi-Fi and Rhythm & Sound, whose Moritz Von Oswald has remastered this material.

Selah Collins “Pick A Sound” begins proceedings with its "version" following (as are most cuts on the album). Check the bass on Kenny Knots “Watch How The People Dancing”, its deep rhythm is stunningly hypnotic, elsewhere “Ready For The Dancehall Tonight” from the fabulously named Peter Bouncer is even better, with a timeless quality and tidy vocal melody.

Other highlights include Mikey Murka’s “Back Your Automatic” and another Kenny Knots slice of brilliance, “Ring My Number”. Add to this excellent music liner notes that take the length of the album to read, making the listening experience also an invaluable history lesson, especially when most of material included is obscure and certainly unavailable anywhere else. 

'Watch How The People Dancing' is a truly essential release for any Reggae fan - the music inspirational and surprising, and unlike many Reggae re-issue labels, it is not a rehash of classic material released too many times on too many formats. Honest Jon’s obviously love the music they release and you, the reggae fan, undoubtedly will too. Recommended. ~warprecords.com

Tracklist:
1. Selah Collins - Pick A Sound
2. Selah Collins - Version
3. Mikey Murka - We Try
4. Mikey Murka - Version
5. Errol Bellot - What A Wonderful Feeling
6. Kenny Knots - Watch How The People Dancing
7. Richie Davis - Lean Boot
8. Richie Davis - Version
9. Peter Bouncer - Ready For The Dancehall Tonight
10. Peter Bouncer - Version
11. Richie Davis - You Ha Fe Cool
12. Richie Davis - Version
13. Kenny Knots - Ring My Number
14. Kenny Knots - Version
15. Mikey Murka - Back Your Automatic
16. Mikey Murka - Control The Dancehall
17. Mikey Murka - Version
18. Jack Wilson & Demon Rockers - Chuck It
19. Mikey Murka - Ride The Rhythm
20. Mikey Murka - Version
21. Kenny Knots - Run Come Call Me

Brilliant, haughty Jamaican avant-gardism, inspired by Jammy's Sleng Teng explosion, rearing up at a Hackney crossroads opposite techno, hiphop, breakbeat and rave. 

Presented as a next-generation companion to London Is The Place For Me: the mood is more defiant — a Jamaican secession from London — with themes of inner-city sufferation running alongside hymns to the dancehall and the herb superb. 

'There’s a whole heap of stuff that we did at that time, different even to the music, that we didn’t really know what we were doing, we just done it. This feeling on the records, we did that with everything we did, it was just the vibes that we were carrying then, it was all about one massive vibes. Even with the sound, we weren’t going to choose something that somebody else did, we definitely was going to choose something that somebody else didn’t use. We wanted to go out there and say, Yeah, this is the wickedest thing, everyone has to know, and nobody else can’t tell we no different. We pushed it that way, we carried on that way.' 



Marvellous Boy
Calypso From West Africa
HONEST JON'S RECORDS


An incredible collection from Honest Jons -- and like some of the rest of their best, music we never would have heard otherwise! The focus here is on calypso music, but recorded in West Africa -- not the usual Caribbean setting -- a very unusual strain of styles that cropped up in the fading colonial years of the British Empire -- as rhythms were routed southward to Africa, via Caribbean migration to the London scene -- making for some really fresh sounds in the end! The work is often much heavier on percussion than its more familiar variant -- and other instrumentation includes some great horn parts, and bits of guitar -- alongside vocals on most numbers. As usual, the notes are historically helpful and very well done -- and titles include "Scrubbs Na Marvellous Boy" and "Poor Freetown Boy" by Famous Scrubbs, "Olubunmi" by Roy Chicago, "Ariwo" by Chris Ajilo & His Cubanos, "Taxi Driver" and "Gentlemen Bobby" by Bobby Benson & His Combo, "Mami" by The Rhythm Aces, "Arria Baby" and "Fire Fire Fire" by Ebenezer Calender & His Maringer Band, "Tree & The Monkey" by ET Mensah, and "Yabomisa Sawale" by Victor Olaiya.  © 1996-2009, Dusty Groove America, Inc.


1.Poor Freetown Boy - Famous Scrubbs
2.Taxi Driver (I Don't Care) - Bobby Benson & His Combo
3.Ariwo - Chris Ajilo & His Cubanos
4.Olubunmi - Roy Chicago
5.Bere Bote - Mayor's Dance Band
6.Nylon Dress - Steven Amchi & His Empire Rhythm Skies/Steven Amechi And His Empire Rhythm Skies
7.Fire Fire Fire - Ebenezer Calender & His Maringer Band
8.Scrubbs Na Marvellous Boy - Famous Scrubbs
9.Dick Tiger's Victory - Godwin Omabuwa & His Sound Makers
10.Igha Suo Gamwen - Rolling Stone & His Traditional Aces
11.Tree And The Monkey, The - E.T. Mensah And His Tempos Band/E.T. Mensah & His Tempos Orchestra
12.Calypso Minor One - Bobby Benson & His Jam Session Orchestra
13.Cost Of Living Nar Freetown - Ebenezer Calender & His Maringer Band
14.Me Nar Poor Old Man Nor Do Me So - Ebenezer Calender & His Maringer Band
15.Gentleman Bobby - Bobby Benson & His Combo
16.Yabomisa Sawale - Victor Olaiya
17.Mami - The Rhythm Aces
18.Arria Baby - Ebenezer Calender & His Maringer Band


**** endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). 



The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orchestras like Lovey's String Band (credited with the first calypso recordings, in 1912). However, the first West African calypso recordings in the modern style are from Freetown, Sierra Leone in the early 1950s, by Ebenezer Calendar and Famous Scrubbs. In arrangements blending African and European instruments, the brass plays out the legacy of colonial military bands, albeit hair-down and a little ramshackle now; and the beautiful creole lyrics are as upful, quick, current, musical and intimate as any classic calypsonian's. 
Decca also organized the first calypso recording session in Ghana, down the coast, where a sound interchangeably designated 'calypso' or 'highlife' ruled urban dancefloors, courtesy of The Tempos — fronted here by Julie Okine — and its spin-offs The Black Beats, The Red Spots, and finally The Rhythm Aces. 
The invasion of King Mensah of Ghana, and The Tempos' money-spinning tour of Nigeria at the start of the 1950s sparked a decade of musical innovation. Bobby Benson’s new highlife eleven-piece included the great trumpeters Victor Olaiya and Roy Chicago — both leaving to lead the bands featured here, the Cool Cats and Rhythm Dandies — and his calypso Taxi Driver was their first, huge, signature hit. (By contrast, little is known about the Nigerian Rolling Stone, whose real name was Roland Onaghise, singing here in the Bini dialect with such rootical frankness.) 
The Mayor's Dance Band was the second lineup run by the celebrated Erekosima 'Rex' Lawson, after the Nigeraphone Studio Orchestra Of Onitsha, and highly successful throughout the 1960s. With Lawson's trademark blend of Igbo lyrics over a Calabari rhythm, reflecting his mixed parentage, and his superb, Caribbean-flavoured trumpet-playing, Bere Bote is the latest of the recordings here. 
Like Lawson, Steven Amechi was from eastern Nigeria — the guitar solo on Nylon Dress is by the king of Igbo highlife, Stephen Osita Osadebe. 
The Tempos' drummer Guy Warren once recalled a trip to London, where he'd played in Kenny Graham's pioneering Afro Cubists: 'When I was in London I went to the Caribbean Club somewhere near Piccadilly, the haunt of a lot of West Indians. It was all calypso every night... When I came back I brought some of these records and we learnt to play them as I knew straightaway that these musical inflections were so highlifish.' And most likely he would have thrown in some of Ambrose Campbell's London recordings of calypso highlife with the West African Rhythm Brothers, including horn players from the Caribbean — at that time making an epochal impact back home in Nigeria. 
And saxophonist Chris Ajilo was likewise deeply impressed by the Afro Cubists, forming his band The Cubanos on his return to Lagos in 1955, after studying at the London School Of Music. (Baba Ani, aka Lekan Animashaun — stalwart of Fela Kuti's music, from the Koola Lobitos to Egypt 80 — was in later lineups.) A tribal 'woro', 'fire dance', from Egun country, obviously Ariwo isn't highlife-calypso, it's cooking afro-cuban jazz with traditional roots; but it exemplifies the open hybridity of all these forms, and the receptivity of their West African milieu to inspiration abroad, as throughout the 1950s West African musicians like King Bruce of The Rhythm Aces, the Sierra Leonean calypsonian Ali Ganda, E.T. Mensah and Zeal Onyia all checked out London's burgeoning West Indian and West African scenes. 
By the early 1960s, calypso was fading in West Africa. US soul and rhythm and blues were poised to replace Caribbean influences, even as there was also a turn towards more traditional, local, African musical material. Still, the dying embers would produce its most classical exponent, Godwin Omabuwa, Nigeria's own Lord Kitchener, ebulliently singing here about a famous victory of the middleweight Dick Tiger. Another graduate of Bobby Benson's orchestras, his band the Casanova Dandies at this time included the jazz modernist Mike Falana, on the eve of his departure for London, where he would join Peter King's African Jazz Messengers. In the face of changing tastes, Omabuwa cut only a few records, and his live audience was steeply reduced to prostitutes and their customers in a Lagos Island dive, but his mastery of the genre was a fitting end to the heyday of calypso in British West Africa. 
 
https://piratebayproxy.live/torrent/5010510/Give_Me_Love__amp__Sprigs_of_Time_[Honet_Jon_s]