Event Info
ROCKSTEADY: THE ROOTS OF REGGAE Album/Film Release Party: SELECTA MOSSMAN , FOUNDATION RADIO
ROCKSTEADY: THE ROOTS OF REGGAE
Album/ Film Release Party
When: Sept 26, 200...
9:30pm - 7:00pm Doors at: 9:30pm
$10 (at the door)
Hard-copy tickets
Event Description
ROCKSTEADY: THE ROOTS OF REGGAE
Album/ Film Release Party
When: Sept 26, 2009 (Sat)
Where: Open Studios (252 East 1st Ave)
Cost: $10 at the Door
Doors: 9:30pm - Late
Montreal’s Mossman to revive rocksteady in Vancouver
To mark the release of acclaimed album and documentary, Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae, Teeks Tekniques is proud to be bringing Montreal-based music producer Mossman to Vancouver this month.
Against a running backdrop of the strikingly shot film, Selecta Mossman – a.k.a. Moss Benjamin Raxlen – will be playing unreleased tracks, outtakes, dub-plates and alternate mixes from the 16-track album and documentary project.
Rare Jamaican rocksteady, early reggae, and classic ska O.G. 45s are also slated to be on the bill.
“It’s stuff that people will probably never hear again,” says Raxlen, promising the audience a unique treat. “For a lot of it, I’m the only person in the world who has the recordings.”
Before there was reggae, there was rocksteady – a slower, more soulful genre that took its roots from the upbeat ska rhythms that had dominated Jamaican airwaves in the early 1960s.
Four decades later, Mossman brings together the genre’s protagonists – Stranger Cole, Hopeton Lewis and Dawn Penn to name a few – to record their greatest hits and perform a reunion concert.
All of it is captured on the Canadian-Swiss co-production directed and written by Stascha Bader.
“The album is a rerecording of the classic hits,” Raxlen says, adding the film and its music tell the artists’ personal stories from an era often referred to as Jamaica’s post-independence Golden Age.
“In the film the artists are taking people into the communities and neighbourhoods where they grew up, and are showing them the history of the time period.”
Raxlen adds his upcoming set will also be infused with new takes on old classics.
“Rocksteady rhythms have never really died,” he says. “They just kind of reentered into dancehall and got recycled and reused and continue to this day.”
The Sept. 26 show takes place at Open Studios and tickets are $10 at the door. Special guests Foundation Radio will be providing support with a heavy rotation of old school reggae and rockers.
Venue
#200 - 252 East 1st Avenue