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    Diplo’s Port Antonio, Jamaica

    Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica, particularly its Portland parish on the northeast coast, nearly 20 years ago. “I was D. J.ing on a cruise ship, got off in Ocho Rios, and drove through Port Antonio to get to Kingston,” said the 13-time Grammy nominee who has collaborated with Dua Lipa, Sturgil Simpson, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Bad Bunny and countless other musicians. “Portland is sort of like Costa Rica, all jungly and waterfalls. And Port Antonio is this quaint little town where I’d go on a sort of retreat, “Mr. Pentz added. About eight years ago he bought some farmland and built a house there.Mr. Pentz thinks Port Antonio is a calmer option than Ocho Rios or other popular tourist spots on Jamaica for people who enjoy nature, hiking, waterfalls and, of course, beaches. It’s also for those who seek a more authentic experience. “It’s the sort of city where you’re mixing with the locals, and I think that’s what special about it,” he said.Diplo, the Grammy-nominated D.J. born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica nearly 20 years ago and built a house there about eight years ago. Cambron LylesBorn in Mississippi and raised in Florida, Mr. Pentz has traveled extensively and D.J.ed on every continent, including Antarctica. A livestream of his D.J. set there, which took place on the helipad of Atlas Ocean Voyages’ World Voyager, was posted on YouTube in January.Recently, Mr. Pentz has become a runner. He ran the Los Angeles marathon and competed in the Malibu Triathlon, but found that something was missing from the experience: a post-run celebration. So, he launched Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K runs — the inaugural events take place this fall in Seattle and San Francisco — culminating in afterparties, with D.J. sets from Diplo and friends, at the finish line. When he’s not running or traveling for work, he spends time at his home in Jamaica.Here are five of his favorite places in and around Port Antonio.1. Geejam HotelGeejam Hotel has private villas, cabins and a main building with rooms that are often occupied by working musicians.Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesOne of the hotel’s cabins, which are tucked into the garden.Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Appeals Court Overturns Vybz Kartel’s Murder Conviction

    A judge ruled that the dancehall artist’s 2014 trial had proceeded improperly after a claim of juror misconduct.The murder conviction of the dancehall artist Vybz Kartel and three co-defendants was overturned on Thursday by the highest court of appeal for Jamaica and other Commonwealth countries.Vybz Kartel, born Adidja Palmer, had previously been convicted and given a life sentence for the 2011 murder of Clive Williams, known as Lizard. The sentence was later reduced to 32 and a half years.On Thursday, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London overturned the conviction because of allegations of jury misconduct in the 2014 trial. A juror, described in court documents as “Juror X,” was allowed to remain seated after a claim that the person had attempted to bribe other members of the jury. Jurors ultimately convicted Mr. Palmer, Shawn Campbell, Kahira Jones and André St. John of murder.“Allowing Juror X to remain on the jury is fatal to the safety of the convictions which followed,” the court ruled. “It was an infringement of the appellants’ fundamental right to a fair hearing under the Jamaican Constitution.”Another appeals court will now decide whether Mr. Palmer should be retried. Lawyers for Mr. Palmer and for the prosecution did not immediately respond to requests for comment.After a string of successful singles in his native Jamaica, Mr. Palmer reached U.S. charts in 2009 with “Romping Shop,” which also featured Spice, and collaborated with Rihanna, Jay-Z and other artists. He also starred in the reality TV show “Teacha’s Pet,” which aired on Jamaican TV in 2011. While imprisoned, Mr. Palmer continued to release new songs, including the 2016 single “Fever,” which went gold.During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Mr. Williams and another man had been given two unlicensed firearms belonging to Mr. Palmer. When the pair did not return the weapons on time, they were summoned to Mr. Palmer’s house, where Mr. Williams was killed, according to prosecutors, who relied on evidence from Mr. Palmer’s cellphone to advance their case. Mr. Williams’s body was never found.All four defendants had pleaded not guilty. More

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    Aston Barrett, 77, Bass-Playing Force With Bob Marley and Wailers, Dies

    Known by his nickname, Family Man, he was the group’s musical director, crafting the hypnotic rhythms and melodies that elevated reggae to global acclaim.Aston Barrett, who as the bass player and musical director for the Wailers — both with Bob Marley and for decades after the singer’s death in 1981 — crafted the hypnotic rhythms and complex melodies that helped elevate reggae to international acclaim, died on Saturday in Miami. He was 77.The cause of death, at a hospital, was heart failure after a series of strokes, according to his son Aston Barrett Jr., a drummer who took over the Wailers from his father in 2016.Mr. Barrett was already well known around Jamaica as a session musician when, in 1969, Mr. Marley asked him and his brother, Carlton, a drummer, to join the Wailers as the band’s rhythm section.More than anyone else, the collaboration between Mr. Marley and his bassist turned both the Wailers and reggae itself into a global phenomenon during the 1970s.Mr. Barrett with Mr. Marley in 1977. He kept the Wailers going after Mr. Marley died in 1981, playing an evolving sound rooted in his musical innovations.Kate SimonMr. Marley wrote and sang the songs and was the band’s soulfully charismatic frontman. Mr. Barrett arranged and often produced the music. He also kept the band organized during its constant touring, earning him the nickname Family Man — or, to his close friends, Fams.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Jamaica Mistaica’: Jimmy Buffett Song Inspired After Plane Sprayed by Gunfire

    In 1996, the police in Jamaica mistook Buffett for a drug smuggler after he landed his seaplane with the singer Bono and others on board and opened fire on it.Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.It’s one of the many tales that have resurfaced after his death on Friday.While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.Also on board the HU-16 Grumman Albatross plane was Bono’s wife, Ali, their two young children, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explainWe had only come for chicken we were not a ganja planeWell, you should have seen their faces when they finally realizedWe were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.He later received an apology from the Jamaican government, according to an MTV News report at the time.“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’” More

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    Sean Paul Is Still Busy

    The song is a giddy exaltation of oscillating hips in full swing, of beautiful backsides and the beautiful forms they belong to as they get jiggy, get crunked up, percolate. It is a knight’s declaration of courtly love to his five fair ladies: Jodi, Rebecca, Annabella, the Misses Donna and Cana. It is a lover’s sincere exhortation to his beloveds to shake that thing, made with a sly exuberance that is both worshipful and raunchy.This is the seminal dancehall classic “Get Busy,” a 21-year-old party anthem that has been the source of dance-floor awakenings for generations of horny teenagers and young adults. And the knight paying homage to the things he is so respectfully asking the ladies to shake is Sean Paul, arguably Jamaica’s most famous musical export to the United States since Bob Marley. Two decades ago, after dethroning 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” from its No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, “Get Busy” did for Sean Paul what “Taxi Driver” did for Paul Schrader and “Liebesträume No. 3” did for Franz Liszt. This was the work that made an instant legend of its creator, who until then had been only a moderately successful purveyor of dancehall, Jamaica’s musical successor to reggae.Young people today seem to be discovering Sean Paul with the same delight their elders once did in middle school. On TikTok, the barometer of all contemporary youth relevance, influencers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, who were un- or barely born in 2003, can be found participating in viral dance challenges to “Get Busy,” while millennial comedians 10 years their senior make videos about the unfairness of being in seventh grade when the song was ruling clubs. Like low-rise jeans, going-out tops and the “Fast & Furious” franchise, Sean Paul is one of those ubiquitous elements of Y2K-era American life that is experiencing a thundering resurgence.Paul performing at “MTV Spring Break” in Miami Beach in 2003.Scott Gries/Getty ImagesSting and Paul onstage at the Grammy Awards in 2004. Paul’s “Dutty Rock” won the award for best reggae album.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesI sat down with Paul on a salubrious June afternoon — “salubrious” was his choice of word — on Hellshire Beach near Kingston, where sargassum clogs the shoreline and clusters of shacks jostle for limited space on the ever-shrinking sands. At one of these establishments (either Screechy’s or Screechie’s, depending on whether you believe the indoor spelling or the outdoor one), covers were removed from platters of fried red snapper as Paul, wearing bright-orange cargo shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “DUTTY,” unrolled his smoking paraphernalia. He was by turns sprightly and pensive. The party-boy persona that once made him a megastar has evolved into that of a fun but responsible uncle — the one who still knows how to throw a party but will also ensure that everyone eats well and gets home safely afterward. The night before, for instance, in the courtyard of a studio I was told had been built by Shaggy and his former manager, I watched some of Paul’s associates smoke from a many-feet-long chalice pipe as they waited to begin rehearsals for a coming tour. When Paul drove up, he announced that he had brought a case of mangoes from his own orchard, and I was treated to the wholesome tableau of a group of grown men tearing into a cardboard box, each extracting a mango and biting in with sighs and groans of unadulterated relish. The rehearsal featured breaks to crack open bottles of industrial-strength white rum — and loud shouts of laughter, including at my saying I shouldn’t drink while working and at my frozen expression when I did finally try a sip. This jovial gathering of dad bods, dad shorts and dad jokes more resembled the vibe of an after-school band rehearsal than a multiplatinum recording artist preparing to play a sold-out arena — perhaps because some of these guys really have known Paul since his earliest days in music.As Paul explained to me at Screechy/ie’s, for his life to become what it is now — that of a Grammy-winning artist with YouTube views in the multiple billions and a catalog of beloved classics — a series of extremely fortunate events had to occur. And a fair number of them, he didn’t have much say in. Long before he became the bandannaed and cornrowed Sean Paul who entranced the American public, Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques was just another young offshoot of Jamaica’s famous Henriques clan, one of the oldest Jewish families on the island, who immigrated there from Portugal in the 17th century. Paul, who has British and Chinese heritage on his mother’s side, actually grew up Catholic in solidly respectable Uptown Kingston, watching the raucous parties thrown at his grandmother’s home by an enterprising aunt who ran a sound system. Kingston is a city that takes parties seriously, and the sound system was a key 20th-century innovation — a portable setup of amplifiers, turntables and mountains of speakers, all orchestrated by a D.J. and an M.C., who truck the equipment to makeshift venues and use its booming sound to draw crowds. Paul and his younger brother, Jason, were both enamored of this family business; Jason actually recalls falling asleep in a bass box as a child. It was both brothers’ earliest immersion in music, listening to the Uptown crowds dance to Michael Jackson beats blended with the dancehall and reggae rhythms of Kingston. Despite the legacy Paul was born into, his childhood was shaped by absences — like that of his father, Garth, who would disappear for months at a time, leaving his wife, Frances, hunting door to door, asking neighbors if they had seen him. He would materialize, months later, perhaps having whiled away the time in Mexico, once having crashed a Cherokee 6 plane stuffed full of marijuana in the Everglades. When Paul was 13, his father was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. This devastated Paul — not because his father had been much of a presence in his life but because what little he had of him would now be gone. It felt, he says, like “that’s forever — Oh, I’ll never see this dude again.”Paul with his father, Garth Henriques, at the National Stadium swimming pool in Kingston.via Sean PaulHis mother sent him to Wolmer’s Boys’ School, among the oldest in Jamaica. Paul, who until then had been a bit of a dreamer, was thrust into a teenage milieu far removed from his former Jewish prep school; he began getting in fights with kids who teased him about his father being in prison. He was saved from a descent into hooliganism by swimming, a sport for which the Henriques family is well known. Both of Paul’s parents were champion swimmers, and he carried on that legacy, representing Jamaica at international competitions and as a water-polo player, his days beginning at 5:30 a.m. and spent training furiously.Still, his grades weren’t good enough to get him into college, which was beyond his mother’s means anyway. He enrolled in a program for hotel management and learned the basics of French cuisine (yes, Sean Paul of “Temperature” fame knows how to make hollandaise); for a time he worked as a bank teller while making demo tapes in private. He would freestyle with a group called the Dutty Cup Crew, and there was a time when his father, newly released from prison, tried to introduce him to people in the music industry. But watching Sean — thoughtful, introspective Sean — pursue a career as an M.C. and dancehall toaster still seemed outlandish to those around him. He recalls a well-intentioned friend getting drunk at a party and crying while asking him why he was throwing his life away.Paul in 1992. While privately making demo tapes, Paul worked as a bank teller and learned the basics of French cuisine while enrolled in a hotel-management program.Michael WoodsThe real hitch in his early career wasn’t his demeanor; it was the subjects he wanted to write about. The young Sean Paul was intensely affected by the differences he saw in the quality of life between Uptown and Downtown Kingston. The early songs he wrote were of a subgenre classified as conscious reggae — socially minded stuff, meant to highlight the injustices he saw around him. He didn’t see any trouble with this until a producer took him aside and told him flat out: No one wanted to listen to conscious songs from a light-skinned Uptown kid. He might have had a father in prison for manslaughter and a mother who, he says, did tie-dye to support the family, and he might have grown up occasionally eating callaloo picked from the backyard, but on paper he was a posh boy with a surname and family legacy that made it impossible for him to be taken seriously while singing about wealth inequality. Crestfallen but persuaded, Paul pivoted, channeling his sensitivities into the topics producers wanted him to sing about: parties, women and weed. One result was “Baby Girl,” a stripped-down track in which Paul entreats a woman to dry her eyes, leave her no-good man and come to him — a man who will “love yuh fi yuh body, but more fi yuh brain.” To him, Paul says, this was still a conscious song: “In dancehall, you always sing big of the ladies, how good they look or about wanting to get with them. But you never sing about: ‘I hear you in trouble? You’re in a relationship where you’re being abused? I’ll be there for you.’ That’s what the song was about.”In dancehall, masculinity is often a kind of balloon animal the M.C. inflates and twists into aggrandized shapes. In her book “Dancehall: Origins, History, Future,” the professor Donna P. Hope identifies the “six G’s” lyrics tend to dwell on (gun, gyal, ghetto, gays, ganja, God) and how each can be used to underline the vocalist’s machismo. The genre had made inroads into the U.S. market before — from Super Cat, Shabba Ranks, Beenie Man, Ini Kamoze — but if Paul would one day top them all, perhaps it’s because even at the peak of his party-boy persona, he understood that longing for things you cannot have is a universal sentiment. He has spent his entire career writing soft-focus love songs and ballads of unrequited yearning; they’re just disguised as songs to grind pelvises to. “Temperature” promises to “shelter you from the storm.” “Rockabye” is an earnest tribute to single mothers. On “Give It Up to Me,” he promises “love so clear/It gonna make you shine, and once you are mine/We be rockin it until the end of time.” These are club tracks, but if you, just hypothetically, happened to be listening to them on repeat during your fifth hour of silently hiccup-sobbing into a pillow (don’t ask), they would absolutely deliver in that arena as well.“Baby Girl” was Paul’s first local radio hit, earning him some popularity in Jamaica and paving the way for his first U.S. studio album. But it was his sophomore LP, “Dutty Rock,” that made Sean Paul into the commercial leviathan he is today. In 2002, a brief New York Times article noted an interesting new record featuring 19 songs, by different artists, all built on the same bewitching “riddim,” a basic beat for dancehall artists to record over. Created by a producer named Steven (Lenky) Marsden, the Diwali riddim — named after the Hindu festival — was built on frenetic syncopated hand claps that escalate over an underlying boom. At the time, Marsden had no sense of the classic he had created. But if you were alive in the early 2000s, you simply could not escape the contagious sound of this percussive loop, which would bounce and undulate its way through the culture everywhere, from Lumidee’s charmingly off-key hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” to Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.” Paul in Norbrook, an upscale neighborhood in Kingston, in July. A younger Paul had wanted to sing about wealth inequality, until a producer told him that no one wanted those songs from an uptown kid like him. Naila Ruechel for The New York TimesMarsden received a phone call from VP Records asking if he would lend the riddim to one of their buzzy new artists: Sean Paul. The result was “Get Busy,” a monstrous hit that transformed Paul’s career and helped sell nearly six million copies of “Dutty Rock.” Back in the clubs-cars-and-Cristal era of R.&B., the “Get Busy” music video was an anomaly, too, depicting a party that would be recognizable to suburban diasporas everywhere: adults gathered around a dining table, young people crowding the unfinished basement below, an angry Caribbean dad in a loud batik-print shirt yelling at the youths to “stop banging on the damn furnace.”Paul is now closer to the age of that video dad than the basement party-starter he played. In the intervening years, he has remained booked and busy, ushering in a steady procession of hit songs, both his own and in collaborations with other pop stars. Whether you have recognized it or not, a new song of his has likely made its way to you in the past eight years — perhaps by way of “No Lie,” his collaboration with a sandpaper-voiced, prefame Dua Lipa; his work with the actor Idris Elba on the rambunctious “Boasty”; or his guest feature on Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” which seemed to blare constantly from the stock-exchange-size H&M in Times Square in the summer of 2017. Paul may now be an elder statesman of dancehall, but he is still producing, recording and performing with vigor. As for the Jodi in “Get Busy,” she’s now his wife. I am one of those millennials who discovered Sean Paul at age 12 — but I also grew up in a secluded, almost cultlike boarding school in India, where we were forbidden any sort of internet access and had little idea what was popular among people our age in the outside world. My only familiarity with reggae was by way of an English guy named Steven Kapur who grew dreadlocks, called himself Apache Indian and sang in a Punjabi-inflected patois about wanting an arranged marriage with a dainty Indian girl who would make him rotis. I did recognize the Diwali riddim, but only because the Lumidee hit based on it would play when Megan Fox’s character appeared onscreen in the Lindsay Lohan classic “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” Still: Somehow, by way of some entrepreneurial soul who knew how to burn pirated music onto CDs, “Get Busy” would play on repeat at my all-girls school’s gatherings with boys from a neighboring school, where chaperones were stationed at every corner to prevent anyone from getting even remotely busy. Whether it’s at a grimy nightclub or in an auditorium full of emotionally stunted teenagers avoiding eye contact in Dehradun, India, there are a few things likely to occur whenever a D.J. puts on “Get Busy” for a crowd of the right age. There will be squeals of recognition as Paul booms “SHAKE … THAT … THING,” each word with its vertiginous pause. Then the delirious, almost incantatory hand claps will start to register: “It’s the ignition of those butterflies,” he told me. As Paul’s exuberant melodies combine with the boisterous throb of the Diwali riddim, listeners’ hips and waists acquire a sentience of their own, moving as if threatening to secede from the rest of the body.This was true in 2003 — some 40-year-olds I asked wistfully confirmed this for me — and it remains true two decades later. I watched Paul live in concert, not once but twice, last year in New York. He was a consummate showman, with unflagging reserves of energy, leaping around in front of the giant Jamaican flag draped over the D.J. console overseen by his brother. Paul seemed to know exactly who his audience was, and to this audience he gave exactly what we wanted: his biggest hits, opening immediately with the iconic intro of “Get Busy,” to which we all lost our minds. On both occasions, I witnessed elder millennials try hip movements far beyond our joints’ collagen levels. Each time I felt as though I had been factory reset as a person.Paul at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2022.Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressThe members of Paul’s preteen fandom — whether that means me in 2003 or the kids browsing TikTok a year ago — might not have had any frame of reference for the parties and spliffs that he was singing about, the Jamaican patois he was singing in or his place in the lineage of dancehall. But a thumping party track is a thumping party track, and not knowing the lyrics would not stop any of us from, as one recent video elegantly put it, “throwing ass” to his bangers, then or now. For decades, Paul has offered the service so much great pop does: distilling a mythical idea of the perfect party, the always-pumping club, and delivering it into the minds and ears of people who will not learn for years that real clubgoing tends to be much more tedious and involve uncomfortable shoes. For someone like me — someone who, until I moved away from home, wasn’t even allowed to go to parties, let alone parties with sexually suggestive dancing — Paul’s songs were about the poetry and promise of dark, sweaty basements and libidinous gyrations. Neither was part of my life at 12, and neither are part of it as a not-so-young-anymore adult with an office job. But Paul’s best songs take all your amorphous longings and feelings of exile — whether imposed by a pandemic or a boarding school or a lost youth — and exorcise them.I can’t wait for the weekend, I can’t want to see that girl again: That, Paul told me in Kingston, is the type of anticipation he puts into his songs. Because if there is one thing he has understood since he was 14, it is the stultifying restlessness that lurks beneath the lives of suburban teenagers. Today he considers it his artistic purpose to exalt uncomplicated ease and pleasure. His legacy is the pure euphoria that erupts on faces when he performs “Get Busy.” The fact that he has been doing this for more than 20 years struck him, recently, when he realized that the nieces and nephews who were infants when the song took off are now old enough to drink and party and experience their uncle’s concerts. “And then they start going to the shows,” he giggled, “and they’re like, Yo?!” At 22, he said, he had wanted to sing about social evils. At 50, he has found peace simply taking people’s minds off them.Iva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine, where her past articles have included an ode to the delights of eating raw onions and an exploration of the popularity of the TV show “Emily in Paris.” This is her first feature for the magazine. Naila Ruechel is a photographer originally from Jamaica known for lush, elegant imagery with a heightened sense of intimacy. More

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    Island Records’ Chris Blackwell Finally Tells His Story

    In a new memoir, the 84-year-old founder of Island Records reflects on helping bring the music of Bob Marley, U2 and Grace Jones to the world.Most music industry memoirs are front-loaded with celebrity name-dropping. “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond” by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records — whose success with Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood and Grace Jones would offer plenty to boast about — instead opens with a parable.In 1955, Blackwell was a wealthy, 18-year-old Englishman whose family was part of Jamaica’s colonial elite. Lost and thirsty after his motorboat ran out of gas, Blackwell came across a Rastafari man — a member of what was then still an outcast group feared by Anglo-Jamaicans as menacing “black heart men.” But this Samaritan in dreads took Blackwell into his community, offering him food, water and a place to rest; the young visitor awoke to find his hosts softly reading from the Bible.That encounter set Blackwell on a remarkable path through music, with Jamaica at its center. He is one of the people most responsible for popularizing reggae throughout the world, and as Island grew to a trans-Atlantic mini-empire of rock, folk, reggae and pop, it became a model for nimble and eclectic indie labels everywhere.Yet it may be impossible now to not also see the Rastafari episode through the lens of race and colonialism, as the story of a privileged young man gaining access to the primarily Black culture that would make him rich and powerful. Blackwell, who turns 85 this month, acknowledged that debt in a recent interview.“I was just somebody who was a fan,” he said, in a mellow upper-class accent shaped by his time at British public schools. “I grew up amongst Black people. I spent more time with Black people than white people because I was an only child and I was sick. They were the staff, the gardeners, the grooms. But I got to care a lot about them and got to recognize very early how different their life was from mine.”When asked why he started the label, in 1959, he said: “I guess I thought I’d just have a go. It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something. It was really trying to uplift the artists.”From left: U2’s the Edge, Bono, the band’s manager Paul McGuinness, Blackwell and Adam Clayton.L. Cohen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesALTHOUGH HE IS from the same generation of music impresarios as Berry Gordy and Clive Davis, who have been tending their reputations in public for decades, Blackwell is perhaps the most publicity-shy and least understood of the so-called “record men.” As label boss or producer, he has been behind era-defining music by Cat Stevens, Traffic, Roxy Music, the B-52’s, Robert Palmer and Tom Tom Club, not to mention U2 and Marley.Yet in his heyday Blackwell went so far to avoid the limelight that few photos exist of him with Marley — he did not want to be seen as the white Svengali to a Black star. Meeting last month for coffee and eggs near the Upper West Side apartment where he spends a few weeks a year, Blackwell had a thin white beard and was dressed in faded sweats and sneakers. Back in Jamaica, his preferred footwear is flip-flops, or nothing at all.“It’s not an exaggeration to say Chris offered a role model to some of us on how to live,” Bono of U2 wrote in an email. “I remember him saying to me once standing outside one of his properties: ‘Try not to shove your success in the face of people who don’t have as much success. Try to be discreet.’ His perfect manners and plummy tremolo of a voice never came across as entitlement. He was himself at all times.”Paul Morley, the music journalist who wrote “The Islander” with Blackwell, said it was only after Blackwell sold Island to PolyGram in 1989, for nearly $300 million — it is now part of the giant Universal Music Group — that he began to show any interest in claiming his place in history.“Chris always likes to be in the background,” said Jones, who released her first Island record in 1977. “I’m even surprised that he’s done the book.”BORN IN 1937 to a family that had made its fortune in Jamaica growing sugar cane and making rum, Blackwell grew up on the island around wealthy Brits and vacationing celebrities. His mother, Blanche, was friendly with Errol Flynn and Noël Coward. She also had a longtime affair with Ian Fleming, who wrote his James Bond novels at the nearby GoldenEye estate — though in the book and in person Blackwell goes no further than describing the two as “the very best of friends.”By the late 1950s, Blackwell was involved in the nascent Jamaican pop business. He supplied records to jukeboxes and the operators of “soundsystems” for outdoor dance parties; “I was pretty much the only one of my complexion there,” he recalled.Soon he began producing records of his own. In 1962, Blackwell moved to London and began licensing ska singles — the bubbly, upbeat predecessor of reggae — which he sold to shops serving Jamaican immigrants out of the back of his Mini Cooper.In 1964, he landed his first hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” a two-minute slice of exquisite skabblegum sung by a Jamaican teenager, Millie Small. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and in the United States, and sold more than six million copies, though Blackwell was aghast at how instant stardom had transformed Millie’s life. Back in Jamaica, her mother seemed to barely recognize Millie, curtsying before her daughter as if she was visiting royalty. “What had I done?” Blackwell wrote. He swore to no longer chase pop hits as a goal in itself.“The Islander,” which arrived on Tuesday, makes a case for the record label boss not as a domineering captain but as an enabler of serendipity. Shortly after his success with Millie, Blackwell saw the Spencer Davis Group, whose singer, the teenage Steve Winwood, “sounded like Ray Charles on helium.” In 1967, Blackwell rented a cottage for Winwood’s next band, Traffic, to jam, and seemed content to just see what they came up with there.“It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something,” Blackwell said. “It was really trying to uplift the artists.”Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesA little over a decade later, Blackwell put Jones together with the house band at Compass Point, the studio he built in the Bahamas. Jones said the results made her a better artist.“I found my voice working with Chris,” she said in an interview. “He allowed me to be myself, and extend myself, in a way, by putting me together with musicians. It was an experiment, but it really worked.”When U2 began working on its fourth album, “The Unforgettable Fire,” the band wanted to hire Brian Eno as a producer. Blackwell, thinking of Eno an avant-gardist, opposed the idea. But after talking to Bono and the Edge about it, Blackwell accepted their decision. Eno and Daniel Lanois produced “The Unforgettable Fire” and its follow-up, “The Joshua Tree,” which established U2 as global superstars.“When he understood the band’s desire to develop and grow, to access other colors and moods,” Bono added, “he got out of the way of a relationship that turned out to be crucial for us. The story reveals more on the depth of Chris’s commitment to serve us and not the other way around. There was no bullying ever.”BLACKWELL’S MOST FASCINATING artist relationship was with Marley, where he used a heavier hand and had an even greater impact.Although Island had distributed 1960s singles by the Wailers, Marley’s band with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, Blackwell did not meet them until 1972, after the group finished a British tour but needed money to return to Jamaica. He was immediately struck by their presence. “When they entered they didn’t look broken down,” he said. “They looked like kings.”Yet Blackwell advised them that to get played on the radio, they needed to present themselves not as a simple reggae band but as a “Black rock act,” and go after “college kids” (code for a middle-class white audience). Blackwell recalls that Livingston and Tosh were skeptical but Marley was intrigued. The three recorded the basic tracks for their next album in Jamaica, but Blackwell and Marley then reworked the tapes in London — bringing in white session players like the guitarist Wayne Perkins and the keyboardist John Bundrick.The resulting album, “Catch a Fire,” was the most sophisticated-sounding reggae release of its time, though it also kicked off a debate that continues today: How much was Marley’s sound and image shaped by Blackwell and Island for the sake of a white crossover? That question comes into bolder relief when Blackwell recounts the origins of “Legend,” the hits compilation that Island released in 1984, three years after Marley died.In the book, Blackwell writes that he gave the job to Dave Robinson of Stiff Records, who came to work at Island after Blackwell made a deal with Stiff. Robinson, surprised by the low sales of Marley’s catalog, targeted the mainstream white audience. That meant refining the track list to favor uplifting songs and limit his more confrontational political music. Marketing for the album, which included a video featuring Paul McCartney, downplayed the word “reggae.”It worked: “Legend” became one of most successful albums of all time, selling 27 million copies around the world, according to Blackwell. And it did not erase Marley’s legacy as a revolutionary.From left: Junior Marvin, Bob Marley, Jacob Miller and Blackwell in 1980.Nathalie DelonMarley’s daughter Cedella, who runs the family business as the chief executive of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, had no complaints. “You can’t regret ‘Legend,’” she said in an interview. “And if you want to listen to the loving Bob, the revolutionary Bob, the playful Bob — it’s all there.”Throughout “The Islander,” Blackwell drops astonishing asides. He passed on signing Pink Floyd, he writes, “because they seemed too boring,” and Madonna “because I couldn’t work out what on earth I could do for her.”Still, it is sometimes puzzling what Blackwell omits or plays down. Despite the centrality of reggae to Island’s story, giants of the genre like Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse are mentioned only briefly. Blackwell writes about former wives and girlfriends but not his two sons.Even those who might take offense still seem in awe. Dickie Jobson, a friend and associate who directed the 1982 film “Countryman,” about a man who embodied Rastafarianism, gets little ink. “Chris’s best friend in life was my cousin Dickie Jobson, so I was a little disappointed in the book where Dickie is only mentioned three times,” said Wayne Jobson, a producer also known as Native Wayne. “But Chris has a lot of friends,” he said, adding that Blackwell is “a national treasure of Jamaica.”The latter chapters of the book are the most dramatic, where Blackwell recounts how cash-flow shortages — Island couldn’t pay U2’s royalty bill at one point, so Blackwell gave the band 10 percent of the company instead — and bad business decisions led him to sell Island. “I don’t regret it, because I put myself there,” Blackwell said. “I made my own mistakes.”In recent years, having sold most of his music interests, Blackwell has devoted himself to his resort properties in Jamaica, seeing it as his final legacy to promote the country as he would an artist. Each improvement or tweak to GoldenEye, for example, he sees as “remixing.”“If you say it yourself it sounds soppy,” Blackwell said. “But I love Jamaica. I love Jamaican people. Jamaican people looked after me. And I’ve always felt that whatever I can do to help, I would do so.” More

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    Two Members of the Mighty Diamonds, Acclaimed Reggae Trio, Are Dead

    Tabby Diamond, 66, was shot and killed Tuesday in Kingston, Jamaica. Bunny Diamond, 70, died three days later after a long illness.Two members of the Mighty Diamonds, a Jamaican trio that helped lead the wave of roots reggae arising from the streets of Kingston to international acclaim in the 1970s, have died within days of each other.Tabby Diamond, whose birth name was Donald Shaw, was shot and killed outside his home in Kingston on Tuesday. He was 66.Bunny Diamond, born Fitzroy Simpson, died on Friday at a hospital in the same city. He was 70.Marc-Antoine Chetata, the group’s longtime music publisher, confirmed the deaths. He said that the cause of Bunny Diamond’s death had not been determined but that he had been in declining health since having a stroke in 2015 and suffered from diabetes.The pair, who had first met in school, formed the Mighty Diamonds in 1969 with another former classmate, Lloyd Ferguson, who performed as Judge Diamond. With international hits like “Right Time” and “Pass the Kouchie,” and with more than a half-century of relentless recording and performing, they were by many estimates the longest-running reggae band in Jamaican history.Their deaths came as the group was preparing to record its 47th album and begin a tour.Tabby Diamond was shot late Tuesday night along with four other people, one of whom, Owen Beckford, was also killed. The shooting was first reported by the Jamaica newspaper The Gleaner.In a statement to The Gleaner, the Kingston police said that the shooting was most likely retaliation by a local gang against Mr. Shaw’s son JahMarley, whom the police later took into custody.The Mighty Diamonds were part of a wave of roots reggae acts that swept over Jamaica, North America and Europe in the 1970s, along with Bob Marley and the Wailers, Jimmy Cliff, Black Uhuru and others.The trio blended the classic one-drop beats of reggae with the tight harmonies of Motown; Tabby Diamond often cited the Temptations as one of his band’s inspirations, along with 1960s Jamaican artists like John Holt and Ken Boothe. Unlike several other top reggae acts of that era, the Mighty Diamonds typically eschewed overtly political themes in their lyrics, preferring a more general, spiritual message.From left, Bunny Diamond, Tabby Diamond and Judge Diamond in 1988. “Things change,” Tabby Diamond once said, “but we always write about what’s going on.”Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images“Things change, but we always write about what’s going on,” Tabby Diamond told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2008. “We have some sweet romantic songs, but we’re very aware of things and the dangers and people not getting enough to eat. We need to focus on people loving each other.”Judge Diamond was the group’s primary lyricist, but it was the silky-voiced Tabby Diamond who gave the trio its subtle power, at once relaxed and vibrant, typically backed by a seven-piece band.“The Mighty Diamonds’ smooth harmonies and solid, workmanlike performance evoked a Jamaican version of the O’Jays,” Wayne Robins wrote in a concert review in Newsday in 1986.The band had several hits in Jamaica in the early 1970s, including “Girl You Are Too Young” and “Country Living,” before their first international success, “Right Time,” in 1975. They signed a deal soon afterward with Virgin Records. The next year it released an album, also called “Right Time,” which included that song and several of their earlier hits.They traveled to New Orleans to record their next album, “Ice on Fire,” produced by the celebrated R&B songwriter, pianist and singer Allen Toussaint and released in 1977. An attempt to open the band to more American fans by stripping out much of their reggae sound, the album fell flat, derided by Jamaican and American critics alike as bland and uninspired.“The Diamonds seem here more like a rather average North American close harmony soul group than the reggae beauties they were on the first LP,” Rolling Stone wrote.Chastened, they returned to Jamaica and Channel One, the famous Kingston studio where they had made some of their first records. A string of critical and commercial successes followed, including the albums “Stand Up to Your Judgment,” “Deeper Roots” and “Changes.”One of the group’s most recognizable songs, 1981’s “Pass the Kouchie” — the title was a reference to marijuana — was recorded a year later by the British reggae band Musical Youth as “Pass the Dutchie,” a sanitized version (a “dutchie” is a cooking pot) that became an even bigger hit, rising high on both the U.S. and British charts.Though they were a mainstay on the Jamaican music scene and had international success in the mid-1970s, the Mighty Diamonds never achieved the same level of global stardom as did some of the other reggae acts of their generation, like Mr. Cliff or Mr. Marley — the result, Tabby Diamond often said, of a string of bad managers early in their career.But the trio, all practicing Rastafarians, took it in stride, and they never seemed to mind missing out on the trappings of fame.“They lived the simplicity of the Rastafarians,” Mr. Chetata said in a phone interview.Donald Orlando Shaw was born on Oct. 7, 1955, in Kingston. His father, Ronald Shaw, was a furniture maker, and his mother, Gloria Shaw, worked in a hospital.He is survived by his wife, Evandey Henry; his daughters, Samantha Shaw, Josheina Shaw, Ishika Shaw, Dominique Martin, Naomi Campbell and Sapphire Campbell; his sons, Javion Shaw, JahMarley Shaw and Brad Campbell; and five grandchildren.Fitzroy Ogilvie Matthews Simpson was born on May 10, 1951, in Kingston. His father, Burnett Simpson, moved to England when Fitzroy was young. His mother, Monica Matthews, owned a shop.His wife, Sylvia Simpson, died in 2017. He is survived by his sister, Lorna Howell; his brother, Lloyd Howell; his daughters, Ronece Simpson and Rosemarie Simpson; his sons, Allan Simpson and Omar Simpson; and six grandchildren. Although the members of the Mighty Diamonds all knew one another in school, it was only later, as young men working in Kingston, that they came together as a group. They originally called themselves Limelight, but they changed the name, and adopted their stage names, after Tabby’s mother started calling them the Diamonds.“Bunny, he lived by my house,” Tabby Diamond said in the 2008 interview. “And we thought maybe we can do something together, so we starting singing together. Then, one night we were passing and Bunny was singing and Judge heard him and said, ‘I want to play the guitar to that.’ So we played a few songs together one night and we said, ‘Yes, things can work, things can work out.’”After 40 years of recording and touring, the Mighty Diamonds slowed down in the early 2010s, but they continued to record. They received the Order of Distinction from the Jamaican government, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, in 2021.“Our music deals with one love, music wise and spiritual wise,” Tabby Diamond said in 2008. “We’re really still dealing with the same things from 20, 30, 40 years ago. But the music speaks for itself.”“We’re sending a good message to the people. That’s what we’re here for.” More

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    Robbie Shakespeare, Prolific Reggae Bassist, Is Dead at 68

    As half of the duo Sly and Robbie, he performed or recorded with everyone from Peter Tosh and Grace Jones to Bob Dylan and Serge Gainsbourg.Robbie Shakespeare, a Jamaican bassist who, as half of the rhythm duo Sly and Robbie, played with and produced some of the biggest names in music while transforming reggae with bold infusions of rock, blues and jazz, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Miami. He was 68.Guillaume Bougard, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said the cause was complications of kidney and liver transplants.Starting in the mid-1970s, Sly and Robbie were among the most prolific musicians in the business, reggae or otherwise. Mr. Shakespeare once estimated that they had taken part in 200,000 recordings, either their own or as backup musicians or producers for other artists.Both men came up from the creative cauldron of 1970s Kingston, working as session musicians at the famed Channel One recording studio and playing with reggae superstars like Peter Tosh, including on his 1978 tour as an opening act for the Rolling Stones. That tour gave the duo their first international exposure.Their sound differed from the melody-rich music of Bob Marley, Jamaica’s biggest star, with a heavier emphasis on the beat and overt influences from rock and blues, qualities that prefigured new reggae styles, like dancehall, that emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s.Their willingness to push reggae’s boundaries soon caught the attention of Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records, who saw the possibility of marrying their sound with North American and European pop acts.They provided the driving beats on Grace Jones’s hit 1981 album “Nightclubbing.” They were soon working with acts far from the Kingston sound of their youth, like Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker, and producing singers like Marianne Faithfull, Madonna and Sinead O’Connor.The duo were both hard-core reggae aesthetes and radical innovators, never afraid to break with tradition. Their work with rock musicians led them to fuse rock’s syncopation with reggae’s one-drop beat. And they were among the first musicians to make regular use of electronic drum machines.From left, Mr. Dunbar, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and Mr. Shakespeare. Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Dunbar got their first international exposure with Peter Tosh when he was as an opening act for the Stones in 1978.Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images“Their whole career has been geared toward creating new stuff, what no one else had done before,” said Mr. Bougard, who also licensed some of their work for release in Europe through his label, Tabou1.They were nominated for 13 Grammy Awards and won two: in 1985 for their production of the Black Uhuru album “Anthem,” and in 1999 for their own album “Friends.”That was an apt title, because beyond their musical talents, Mr. Dunbar and Mr. Shakespeare were known for their close personal bond. They were very different people — Mr. Dunbar relaxed and outgoing, Mr. Shakespeare quiet and cerebral — but their talents complemented each other’s, and they could often seem like two halves of a single person.“The longest we’ve been apart in the last 25 years is about three weeks,” Mr. Shakespeare told the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. “It’s very difficult to be apart for that amount of time. I’ll go on holiday with my family, and as soon as I reach the place I’m going to, I want to be back with Sly, playing music.”Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare was born on Sept. 27, 1953, in East Kingston, Jamaica. He grew up in a musical family, but his parents were strict and he left home at 13. He drifted at first, getting into trouble but also spending time around his older brother, Lloyd, who sang in a local band.It was during Lloyd’s practice sessions that Robbie began to learn the guitar — a homemade acoustic one at first. But a chance encounter with the bassist Aston Barrett, known as Family Man, led him to switch instruments.He begged Mr. Barrett to teach him to play bass. Mr. Barrett, who would later join Marley’s band, the Wailers, said yes, but only if he stayed out of trouble. Robbie did more than that; he went home and practiced all night, and the days and nights after, until his fingers bled. Decades later, he showed Mr. Bougard how the strings had worn down his fingerprints until they were practically illegible.Soon he was playing in a series of Kingston bands, often several at once. He would play as a session musician in studios during the day, then perform in clubs at night. It was while working in the clubs that he met Lowell Dunbar, known as Sly, already regarded as one of the best drummers in the city.“He was playing the drums just like how I would always tell the drummers I would play with to play,” Mr. Shakespeare told the website United Reggae in 2012. “He was just doing it and doing it easy and good.”After working for several years at Channel One, Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Dunbar went off on their own, working for Mr. Dunbar’s Taxi label. They had immediate success producing “Showcase,” a 1979 album by the singer Gregory Isaacs, who at the time was one of the best-selling artists in Jamaica.That same year they played with the French singer Serge Gainsbourg on “Aux Armes et Cætera,” a reggae version of the French national anthem, which became one of Mr. Gainsbourg’s biggest hits. They released their first album, “Sly and Robbie Present Taxi,” in 1981.Mr. Shakespeare is survived by his wife, Marian, and a son, Mikiel. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.In 2020 Rolling Stone ranked Mr. Shakespeare 17th on its list of the greatest bassists of all time.The pair continued to make music into the 21st century, even as complications of diabetes left Mr. Shakespeare less able to get around. Their last album, “Rock Hills Road,” was released early this year.“If you’re chosen by music, I don’t think you get to say it’s time to retire,” Mr. Shakespeare told The Scotsman newspaper in 2009. “It’s a very gentle gift, and we’ve been trusted with it.” More