Vibe Merchants is a superb study of the history of Jamaican recording practices with a focus on the role of the audio engineer. There is nothing comparable that has been previously published in the literature on Jamaican popular music. Ray Hitchins starts from the premise that the “analysis of recording process and methodology are critical in the analysis of ‘production standards’” (6).
The first chapter of the book provides detailed information on the history of recording in Jamaica in the 1950s. Based on interviews with recording engineers Donald Hendry and Graeme Goodall, Hitchins interrogates the motivation, mode of operation, and relative success of Stanley Motta’s MRS Studios, which employed a single-microphone approach to record mento largely for tourists, and Ken Khouri’s Records Limited, which employed a very different approach to recording, using three microphones. It is shocking, given all the research on Jamaican popular music, that no one had interviewed these two pioneering engineers before. What emerges is a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of the history of Jamaican recording prior to the advent of ska.
Chapter 2 investigates the transitional period from the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Hitchins discusses the recording studios owned and operated by the two radio stations at the time, RJR and the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation. Based on his interviews with Goodall, Hitchins deconstructs claims by Norman Stolzoff, Lloyd Bradley, and others that these radio studios were readily available for independent producers to record in. This chapter also contains a nuanced analysis of the difference between dubplates/soft wax sound and blank 45 vinyl recordings, both produced on an exclusive basis for sound system dances.
Chapter 3 is entitled “Establishing an Internationally Competitive Recording Model.” In this chapter Hitchins analyzes what the cable radio service RJR was programming in the late 1950s and makes the case that, contrary to Dick Hebdige and other writers on Jamaican popular music, Jamaicans were not regularly consuming music via American radio stations in Miami and New Orleans. Hitchins’s determination that this mostly false concept is partially based on an interview with Jamaican radio engineer Walter Matthews (who, as was the case with Goodall and Hendry, had never been interviewed before). Matthews asserts that local reception of US-based stations in the late 1950s and 1960s was haphazard at best and “often only possible with customized antennas or short-wave receivers.” Even then, Matthews contends, reception tended to be poor (52).
American music was widely available through RJR, and it seems that an inordinate number of Jamaicans (20,000 in the Kingston area alone) subscribed to RJR’s cheap but efficient service. This information appears in no other account of Jamaican popular music. In chapter 3 Hitchins also looks at illicit recording sessions that produced classic proto-r&b; Jamaican recordings such as Laurel Aitkens’s “Boogie in my Bones.” Aitkens’s 1958 single was the first multi-microphone recording in Jamaica and ultimately served as a game changer in terms of local production aesthetics.
In chapter 4, “Establishing a Jamaican Sound,” Hitchins discusses in detail the construction, equipment, and operating method of the first purpose-built professional recording studio in Kingston, Ken Khouri’s Federal Records, in 1959. Hitchins feels that Federal was integral to the development of a recognizably distinct Jamaican sound. A significant part of that sound was a focus on what he terms “emphasized bass” that resulted from the needs of sound system operators to get their patrons to dance and purchase liquor. Hitchins is emphatic in making the case that this was part of a unique Jamaican sound aesthetic and not the result of poor production standards, as has been claimed by many prior authors (84).
Hitchins also stresses that Jamaican recording sessions did not typically involve charts or any other kind of pre-production but instead relied on the “spontaneous creation” abilities of session musicians. He attempts to make the case that this was unique to Jamaica. He fails to note that similar practices were occurring in the same time period at Stax in Memphis, Chess in Chicago, and later on at Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Chapter 4 also contains a particularly good discussion about the different sonic properties of dubplates/soft wax and blank label 45 rpm records that were made specifically for sound system operators.
The book’s remaining five chapters focus on the changing sound, equipment, practices, and aesthetics involved in the transformation from roots reggae to dancehall. Hitchins argues that the criticism that dancehall has received from both academics and earlier practitioners of Jamaican popular music does not begin to recognize (1) the genre’s uniquely Jamaican aesthetics and (2) the nature of creativity, especially on the part of studio engineers, in the creation of dancehall recordings.
Along the way, Hitchins problematizes the common assumption that Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” released in 1985, represented a game-changing moment when the production of Jamaican popular music shifted from a focus on analogue to digital recording. He also discusses riddims, focusing on the role of the engineer in the creation and/or use of riddims and in changes in the nature of riddims over time. In doing this Hitchins provides a detailed account of the introduction and impact of moving from a multi-microphone recording model to a serial recording model and the parallel use of drum machines and synthesizers. Hitchins coins the term “performance mixing” to describe the real-time “improvised” mix typically performed by Jamaican engineers as they mute, apply effects, and fade various tracks as part of their working method in creating early dancehall recordings (141).
Perhaps the central argument of Hitchins’s work is to assert that in Jamaica, and in dancehall in particular, the audio engineer has a much different role than audio engineers have in North America or Europe. In Jamaica, as the title of chapter 7 suggests, the audio engineer not only captures and modifies musical sounds, s/he fulfills a creative role that is integral to the arrangement, structure, sound, and aesthetic of the final recording. These are functions that in other locales are more typically fulfilled by the producer and session musicians.
In chapter 8 Hitchins looks at the introduction of Pro Tools, which led to fully digital recording in Jamaica in the 1990s, while in chapter 9 he provides an excellent ethnography of overdub sessions at the Tuff Gong studio on Hope Road.
Despite a few annoying typos that a better copyedit could have eliminated, Vibe Merchants: The Sound Creators of Jamaican Popular Music is an excellent study that makes a substantial contribution to the literature and understanding of Jamaican popular music produced over a half century. I do not think it is an exaggeration to suggest that this book is a landmark work that, beyond its contribution to our knowledge of Jamaican popular music, provides a superb model for ethnographic work on the art of recording in general. I hope it inspires analogous work in other locales and on other genres.
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[Review length: 1144 words • Review posted on September 5, 2019]