Written by The Resista
SOJA perform Saturday October 17 at the Howlin Wolf in NOLA.
They will be supported by The Movement , The Live Oaks and 27 Lights
The saga of SOJA is the kind that you like to hear as a fan of their Genre. Some of the members of the band have known each other since grade school. All of the band has collectively sought to discover the deeper roots in music, which is often missed in the mainstream. A quote from the band's website from the lead singer Jacob states, “We loved rock and hip hop, but there was something missing in the message. Even with our favorite artists, you would get one song that hit home and touched you, then three that were about nothing. With our favorite artists in the reggae genre, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, they were singing about something beautiful that truly mattered in every song. We never really got over it.”
Aspiring to discover "something beautiful" in their own music has united the band for many years. They have gone further to try to tell the American story using the Jamaican art form. By staying true to this mission the band has had seven releases, mostly on their own label. The band describes their most recent album "Born in Babylon" as the album that they have been wanting to release for ten years.
The Howlin Wolf is very excited to have SOJA perform Saturday October 17. They will be supported by The Movement , The Live Oaks and 27 Lights. It will surely be a great show.
Written by The Resista
One of reggae's most important and prolific producers, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd was a towering figure in the genre's development, from both creative and business standpoints. Like Motown's Berry Gordy, Dodd set up a streamlined, highly professional hit factory at his Studio One facility, recording vast amounts of music for his label of the same name. Like James Brown, Dodd mapped out a rhythmic blueprint that future generations would rely heavily upon; just as hip-hoppers sampled Brown's beats to death, countless dancehall producers lifted and reused (or "versioned") Dodd's rhythm tracks for their own records. Dodd was present at the genesis of Jamaican popular music, evolving from a DJ to a sound-system entrepreneur to a producer to the first black studio owner in Jamaica. In the meantime, he kept his finger on the pulse of popular taste, watching the music evolve from ska to rocksteady to reggae proper, and maintaining a crack studio band that changed with the times; most reggae aficionados tend to agree that his best work came during the rocksteady era of the '60s. Although haphazard documentation makes it difficult to know exactly how many records Dodd produced, it's generally acknowledged that he worked with nearly every major reggae star of the early days at one point or another, including the first recordings by Bob Marley & the Wailers. He also served as a mentor for future production wizards like Lee "Scratch" Perry and Winston "Niney" Holness, among others who apprenticed at Studio One. All in all, it's well nigh impossible to find another behind-the-scenes figure who exerted as much influence on reggae, over such a tremendous period of time, as Coxsone.
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A majority of Higgs' songs were connected to his impoverished life in Trenchtown where he grew up. Higgs considered that it was out of the poverty and violence of Kingston's shantytowns such as Trenchtown and Johnstown that the reggae music had grown. Before reggae hit big on the western music scene with Bob Marley, it was understood as a "ghetto music". Higgs was the very first artist out the ghetto music scene to have lyrics which primarily dealt with every day troubles. In his own words, "the music originated from the confrontation of a struggle... It's not even got to be known as you are from Trenchtown. It is a kind of strength that you have to, really, accumulate. Reggae is a confrontation of sound, man. Reggae has to have a basic vibrant sound which is... to be heard in a ghetto is like playing the bass very loud...and the drum. Those are the basic sounds. A classical reggae should be accepted in any part of the world in the same sense: freedom, that's what it's asking for; acceptance, t'what it needs; and understanding, y'know, that's what reggae say."