Tenor Saw
Tenor Saw got his break as a Sugar Minott protégé around the Youth Promotion sound. But, after being groomed and supported by Sugar, he left Youth Promotion around 1985 and went up to Jammy where he enjoyed his famous string of computer hits including his first big hit Pumpkin Belly, originally a tune he recorded for Youth Promotion. Ring the Alarm, recorded for Winston Riley, was one of the biggest dancehall killers of the decade. No one will ever know the exact cause of his death. His body was found by the side of a Texas road one morning in 1988.
Tenor Saw
Tenor Saw got his break as a Sugar Minott protégé around the Youth Promotion sound. But, after being groomed and supported by Sugar, he left Youth Promotion around 1985 and went up to Jammy where he enjoyed his famous string of computer hits including his first big hit Pumpkin Belly, originally a tune he recorded for Youthh Promotion. Ring the Alarm, recorded for Winston Riley, was one of the biggest dancehall killers of the decade. No one will ever know the exact cause of his death. His body was found by the side of a Texas road one morning in 1988.
Beth Lesser
During the 1980s, my husband and I traveled frequently to Kingston, Jamaica and Brooklyn, NY from our home in Toronto, Canada to follow the changing reggae scene. In that period reggae was changing fast, moving from the heavy roots sound of suffering and redemption to the lighter, faster, digitized sound of modern dancehall.
My husband and I saw it happen. We saw Junjo’s Volcano empire rise meteorically and them crash as his young artists emigrated or met untimely deaths. We witnessed Jah Love’s Brigadier Jerry take over the dancehall scene without ever having recorded a 45 – powered by the new popularity of dance hall cassettes.
We were in Waterhouse when King Jammy unleashed his Sleng Teng rhythm to an analog world and, one by one, producers dropped their previously recorded rhythms and started building again from scratch using programmable keyboards and drum machines. We were in Jammy’s yard while he cut the dubplates for the Clash of the Century, the event that brought dancehall culture to the larger Jamaican audience.
Over those years, I collected an archive of material that I would like to make available to the public – to present and future reggae scholars and fans.
All images © 1982-1988 Beth Lesser
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Download
All photos on this page are available for download. Please fill out the small form below and click submit.
We’ll provide you with a WeTransfer link for a safe and reliable download as soon as possible.
