Recently in 1970s Category

Another recent CD release for a reggae Christmas album from the 70s that I originally owned on vinyl and bought in a Toronto bodega. Only five cuts, but three are epic length workouts. Jacob and Ray give us old school reggae versions of familiar carols like "Wish You a Merry Christmas," which somehow becomes "Irie Christmas," "On the Twelve Day of Ismas," "All I Want For Ismas," which is as much an ode to herb as to the holiday, plus "Deck the Halls" and "Silver Bells/Natty No Santa Claus." A bit monochromatic sounding to some ears no doubt, but this 1978 album still makes a nice holiday change of pace.

The folks at Sanctuary have been busy beavers since they acquired the rights to the Trojan catalog; if you have a full-service record store near you, you've probably seen a couple dozen different box sets from Trojan in your reggae section. (UPDATE: Sanctuary was absorbed by Universal in 2007, so I guess Universal holds the rights to Trojan now.) Naturally, there had to be one dedicated to Christmas reggae, and this 2003 collection is it. There aren't a lot of surprises here, though; a fair proportion of the 50 songs on this three-CD set have already been mentioned elsewhere on this site, an indication that these songs have been compiled and re-compiled over the years. "Santa Claus Is Ska-ing to Town" by the Granville Williams Orchestra, for example, turns up pretty often. Still, fans will recognize a lot of folks on here, like Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Eek-A-Mouse, The Ethiopians and Lee "Scratch" Perry, not to mention The Maytals, presumably including Toots. The collection fills itself out in part by giving several artists multiple entries, among them Yellowman, John Holt, Jacob Miller and Ray I and The Tamlins. This set stands out because of its informative liner notes, which place the recordings between the mid-60s and late 70s and give some background to the individual artists. Like previous compilations, the recording quality of individual songs is all over the map, although it sounds as if it has been remastered, at least to my ears. If you don't have a lot of reggae Christmas music, this might just fill that hole in your collection. Still downloadable, but the hardcopy version is out of print.

I first encountered this record back about 1983 in a Jamaican bodega in Toronto's Kensington Market. (Wikipedia has this as a 1979 original release.) I managed to get a couple of cuts from it onto my holiday mix tapes before the sucker warped like a Lay's potato chip. It took until 2007 for it to be reissued in the digital realm, on CD and as a downloadable album. It remains as good as I remembered it, heavier-sounding than the vintage reggae Christmas albums from Trojan that are endlessly reissued. The centerpiece of the album is a pair of 11-minute carol medleys, which might be a bit much for disc mixers but they no doubt go whizzing by when you're passing the dutchie on the left-hand side for the whole time. Beres Hammond is featured on "Winter Wonderland" and Horace Andy is credited on "O Little Town of Bethlehem." They also work out on the "12 Days of Christmas," get a little clavinet action going on "We Three Kings" and go a bit uptempo on what appears to be the album's only original, "Let X-mas Catch You In a Good Mood." This might sound a little sedate to those used to today's hip-hop flavored varieties of reggae and reggaeton, but it never hurts to get back to the roots.