banjoghost - Posted - 06/29/2007:  17:30:44

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i've been having a lot of fun playing old reggae and ska songs on my banjo lately, clawhammer style. curious if anybody else out there has monkeyed with this. many of these tunes seem to fit right in with the style.

yankee1 - Posted - 06/29/2007:  17:44:01

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Oh man, please post some sound clips! I'd love to hear that on the banjo...

Bryan

Gibson Gangsta - Posted - 06/29/2007:  18:01:44

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I AGREE! POST SOUND! POST SOUND!!

pickin' aint easy.......

burlap - Posted - 06/29/2007:  18:54:57

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We want to hear some reggaegrass!

Banjowen - Posted - 06/30/2007:  05:59:09

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Yaaah....hit us with your s**t bruv....

Owen.


http://www.fiddlehangout.com

www.banjohollow.ic24.net

Turbo - Posted - 06/30/2007:  08:56:49

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John Boulding 'Banjophobic' posted a thread a while ago about this. It was under the 'sound off' section. He played a really cool song...

DanielT - Posted - 06/30/2007:  19:00:22

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banjoghost, I second the suggestion for a sound file. You might be interested in knowing that In Jamaica the banjo is a fairly common instrument, most often played in a genre of music called mento. (Mento is also a kind of rhythmic pattern [or "riddim"], a kind of dance and, I'd say, a particular mode of musical performance.)

To get a pretty good sense of what mento sounds like, you can listen to the following file of the Blue Glaze Mento Band (it's a wmz file, just so you know):
http://www.jcdc.org.jm/audio/BlueGl...ukumbine.wma
If you're wondering, the banjoist, Nelson Chambers, has a Deering 5 string, but like every player in Jamaica I've met, he plays with a pick and without the fifth string. He also capos up to the second fret.

Mento is a predecessor of ska and reggae, and although a couple of mento bands released albums where they played mento songs on ska riddims, its more salient features suggest a stronger connection with reggae.

pweller - Posted - 06/30/2007:  21:05:31

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I've been looking for mento recordings ever since an earlier thread on banjo in world music, but I can't seem to find any on YouTube or anything of the sort. Is banjo a lead instrument in mento or does it do backing?

DanielT - Posted - 06/30/2007:  23:38:29

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quote:

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Originally posted by pweller

I've been looking for mento recordings ever since an earlier thread on banjo in world music, but I can't seem to find any on YouTube or anything of the sort. Is banjo a lead instrument in mento or does it do backing?

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Well, to answer your second question first, it can be both a leader and a backer. It all kind of depends on how good the musician is and whether he's the one starting the band. As for your first question, there are lots of relatively easily available mento albums. Here's a selection that I like:

Boogu Yagga Gal:
http://www.amazon.com/Boogu-Yagga-G...p/B00005UT6F

Take me To Jamaica:
http://www.amazon.com/Take-Me-Jamai...p/B000FJAVHS

These two are of 78rpm recordings from the 1950s.

In what has to be the WORST packaging ever, the 1957 (I think...I'm not going to go look it up right now) album of Lord Foodoos has been re-issued on CD. Pretty nice banjo playing on this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Steel-Band-Ca...p/B00005JG98

The banjo player on this one is REALLY great:
http://www.emusic.com/album/Various...0893681.html

Here's the Blue Glaze Mento Band playing with Stanley Beckford on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHSWV6Oq-5g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MFAnJPi9s
I love these videos.

The banjo players most musicians say was the best was a guy named "Porkchops" who played with Lord Flea on the "Swinging Calypsos" LP. You can usually find a copy of it (on LP!) on eBay for not a lot of money.

That help at all?

voodoo_chilly - Posted - 07/01/2007:  04:25:53

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When I was in Jamaica last summer, there was a guy playing (strumming) a banjo on the street... he had a chain attached and laying across the banjo head for a percussive effect. I have a picture of him somewhere around the house.

John M

DanielT - Posted - 07/01/2007:  12:28:00

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Oh, man, you gotta find that picture and post it! That's awesome!

pweller - Posted - 07/01/2007:  18:48:16

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Oh man, I just saw the youtube clips, that's awesome! You can see where the calypso and jazz rhythms came together to form foundational ska. I'd like people who accuse the banjo of simply being a bluegrass instrument to see clips like these!

Morgan - Posted - 07/01/2007:  19:35:06

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If you're interested in mento, I would recommend looking into the Jolly Boys. They've actually put out a few CDs/LPs on Rykodisk that you might be able to track down. They use acoustic guitar, bongos, rhythm box (basically a really big thumb piano, as far as I can tell), and what looks like a tenor banjo. Quite a few of the songs they recorded have made their way into the calypso canon - a rough analogy might be that mento is to old-time as calypso is to country music. The weird thing is that mento seems to have been largely relegated to hotel and tourist-oriented settings in the islands; I used to meet a fair number of reggae, ska, and even calypso musicians and none of them expressed any serious interest in it.

I actually bought my first banjo (a tenor from the 20s) hoping to play mento as I was already playing guitar in a traditional ska/reggae band, but for some reason it never clicked with me. Years later I traded it in on my first five string and (almost) never looked back.

DanielT - Posted - 07/01/2007:  20:58:02

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quote:

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Originally posted by Morgan

If you're interested in mento, I would recommend looking into the Jolly Boys.

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Jolly Boys is a pretty good band, in fact. I love their "Beer Joint and Tailoring" album.

quote:

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Originally posted by Morgan

They use acoustic guitar, bongos, rhythm box (basically a really big thumb piano, as far as I can tell), and what looks like a tenor banjo.

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Yep, it's a tenor banjo. The original banjoist (and the group's founder) was a guy named Moses Deans. He died a few years back, actually.

BTW, the "thumb piano" you're talking about is usually called a "rumba box" in Jamaica but sometimes it's called a "marimbula." (However, it goes by a variety of different names in different parts of the Caribbean [Cuba, Haiti] and Africa.)

quote:

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Originally posted by Morgan

Quite a few of the songs they recorded have made their way into the calypso canon - a rough analogy might be that mento is to old-time as calypso is to country music.

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A better analogy would be that mento is to reggae as calypso is to soca. You might be surprised to learn that mento and calypso in fact have fairly little to do with one another. Around WWII, marketing Jamaican mento as "calypso" was a way of rebranding it for tourism and the name stuck (the association strengthening following Belafonte's success). While some calypso tunes (from Trinidad) are strong parts of the Jamaican repertory, very little of what the Jolly Boys ever recorded was original. Indeed, I have found that VERY few Trinidadian calypsonians ever do anything that's of Jamaican origin.

quote:

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Originally posted by Morgan

I was already playing guitar in a traditional ska/reggae band

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Awesome! Which band were you in? I used to play guitar in a ska group called Skavoovie that people sometimes described as a "traditional ska" band. It's always nice to come across people from "the old scene."

Morgan - Posted - 07/01/2007:  22:58:37

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quote:

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Originally posted by DanielT

While some calypso tunes (from Trinidad) are strong parts of the Jamaican repertory, very little of what the Jolly Boys ever recorded was original. Indeed, I have found that VERY few Trinidadian calypsonians ever do anything that's of Jamaican origin.

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Gotcha. I know they didn't write their stuff from scratch, but I was just guessing that they were drawing from an earlier tradition - it sounds like mento was actually more of a parallel to early calypso, rather than an ancestor?

quote:

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Originally posted by DanielT

Awesome! Which band were you in? I used to play guitar in a ska group called Skavoovie that people sometimes described as a "traditional ska" band. It's always nice to come across people from "the old scene."

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Oh man, we might actually have met since I was in the Allstonians - I have a bad memory for dates, but I played guitar in the first lineup to have an upright bass, and left after a couple of years after the tour with Laurel Aitken and just before their first non-Moon album came out. Small world!

DanielT - Posted - 07/02/2007:  00:31:21

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quote:

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Originally posted by Morgan

it sounds like mento was actually more of a parallel to early calypso, rather than an ancestor?

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Yep, that's about right.

quote:

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Originally posted by DanielT

Oh man, we might actually have met since I was in the Allstonians - I have a bad memory for dates

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You know, when I was in the band we never played with the Allstonians, except for probably the New England Ska Fest - it sounds like you might have played it in 1998 when Hepcat did. If so, then maybe we did meet. Allstonians, though. Awesome band!

DanielT - Posted - 07/02/2007:  13:48:15

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Morgan,

It's come back to me, we totally did meet once and if it wasn't the NE Ska Fest, it might have been at the Middle East or perhaps TTs. You played some kind of hollow-body guitar, no?

Morgan - Posted - 07/02/2007:  17:32:35

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Yeah, I played a big red Guild hollowbody (I loved that guitar for years, but finally sold it to buy my second five-string banjo - treason!). That NE Ska Fest with Hepcat was one of the first shows my lineup (the drummer and upright bassist were both new as well) played. Was it you that encouraged me to try flatwounds?

Anyhow, to get this back on topic, can you recommend any other mento bands/artists? I've found that compilations and reissues of old calypso and all sorts of Caribbean folk music aren't too hard to find, but mento still seems pretty obscure.

DanielT - Posted - 07/02/2007:  17:52:54

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Yes, I was the one who encouraged you to try flatwounds!

Well, besides the ones I mentioned above (all of those are pretty easily available, even used), you might try the two Stanley Beckford albums on which he plays with the Blue Glaze Mento Band, one's called "Stanley Plays Mento" and the other is "Reggaemento." They're expensive, but I like them pretty well, especially "Reggaemento."

oldwoodchuckb - Posted - 07/06/2007:  04:50:50

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DanielT
The mento tune you linked to:
http://www.jcdc.org.jm/audio/BlueGl...ukumbine.wma
Is definately a relative of a tune called "Skokian" that was a radio hit in the mid to late 1950s. There weren't as many 'classifications" and "subdivisions" of popular music at the time and it was just listed as "calypso". For a while it was everywhere and there were even some ghastly words written to fit the melody.

Somewhere in my collection I have a song in a 3 beat rhythm by someone named Roy Cohen (I think). Recently I've found that "Sugar Hill" fits the tune with slight alteration and goes in the 6/8 rhythm nicely. I know littel about any of the island rhythms or forms but love the seemingly laid back yet relentless drive.

The Whiskey Before Breakfast variations and "F" tuning tabs are now available on the web at: http://home.thegrid.net/~fjbrad/id20.html
There are mp3s of G tunes in F tuning on the web at http://www.box.net/shared/p06kzxt5lv
Rocket Science banjo is on youtube now. Here are the addresses:
Lesson 1 The Basic Stroke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdRuf4X0X7g
Lesson 2 Drop Thumb
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7gmyrlvtS0
Lesson 3 The Big Cluck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy2iCyrsqr0
Julie Anne Johnson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGonhCTQKfM