Love reggae? Learn all about Jamaican music at immersive concert experience coming to Plantation

Rod Stafford Hagwood, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
·4 min read

In Jamaican music’s immediate family, there are reggae, dancehall, ska, rocksteady, dub and mento and Nyabinghi.

Close cousins? That would be hip-hop, reggaeton, EDM and Afrobeats.

Learn about all the relations at Reggae Genealogy — The Origins, Evolution and Influence of Jamaican Music, an outdoor concert blending live music, archival video and narratives being staged at Broward Mall in Plantation on Saturday, Feb. 10.

Produced by Island SPACE Caribbean Museum, the three-hour showcase will trace the early beginnings of popular Jamaican music from before the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1962 through present day.

“Genealogy is supposed to tell you where you’re coming from and who you’re related to,” says Lloyd Stanbury, a museum board member and event chair who was cofounder of Reggae Month in Jamaica and Irie FM radio station. “As someone who has been involved in Jamaica’s music for a while, I think a lot of people love our music, but a lot of people don’t know where it’s coming from, how it came to be, what it is, and also who we are related to.”

The lineup for the concert includes:

“I think to tell this kind of story, which is what the project is about, is storytelling, but we are doing it in an entertaining way,” Stanbury says. “It’s about music, so of course we have to have live music, but to tell a story effectively, you need to have narrators as a part of the presentation, you need to have some video content, you know, that can’t be produced onstage.

“I mean, if you want to hear (the late) Harry Belafonte’s take on what we’re doing, you have to put that in a video. And that’s a part of the whole Jamaican music story,” he adds. “So it ended up being of necessity, that we have narration, video and dancers.”

Also making appearances will be groups such as Dillard Dance, Sasa African Dance Theater and Carimer Theater Co., as well as Lifetime Achievement Award honorees from the music industry: iconic singer Marcia Griffiths (“Electric Boogie/The Electric Slide”), Cedella Marley (CEO of The Marley Group) and Patricia “Miss Pat” Chin (cofounder of global reggae music label VP Records).

For Calibe Thompson, cofounder of the Island SPACE Caribbean Museum (SPACE stands for the Society for the Promotion of Artistic and Cultural Education), it was important the Lifetime Achievement Award honorees all be women.

“I think many music genres are male-dominated, and there was a question of how are we authentically representing women in this story that we’re telling,” she explains. “It’s male-heavy, our music is male-heavy.”

Thompson says the idea for a much smaller project had always been on the planning board, even before the museum opened in 2020.

“One of our initial concepts of a project that we were going to do as a flagship, even before there was a museum conceptualized, was that we were going to do this reggae documentary,” she says. “And we realized at a certain point that we didn’t have the bandwidth or the resources or whatever to do all of this. Somewhere along the way, it morphed into the idea of doing a show.

“We were going to do a little simple show inside of some little community center, but with everything that we do, it just gets bigger and bigger. And here we are with a big stage outside of Broward Mall in the parking lot (and) expecting 1,000 people.”

The event will have narrators, including the likes of Inner Circle (best known for the song “Sweat” and megahit “Bad Boys”) and record company exec/activist Maxine Stowe.

“One of the narrators … not only was a successful broadcaster in Jamaica but moved to South Florida and is a successful broadcaster and part of city government in South Florida, Winston Barnes, commissioner of Miramar,” says Stanbury. “You couldn’t get much better than him in terms of his history, his knowledge of the music.”

Adds Thompson: “Lukkee Chong is (also) a part of the project, he’s one of the foundation people we have of what was for the longest time the only television station in Jamaica … so he has all of this archival footage. It’s him that has this Harry Belafonte footage … these are people who are no longer with us … and we can hear their voices talking about the importance of our dialect to the music … You’re not gonna get a lecture from anybody, but little tidbits of their experience in the growth and evolution of the music.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Reggae Genealogy — The Origins, Evolution and Influence of Jamaican Music

WHEN: Saturday, Feb. 10; gates open at 3 p.m., with showtime set for 6 p.m.

WHERE: Broward Mall, 8000 W. Broward Blvd., Plantation, in the northeast parking lot

COST: General admission tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the gate; VIP tickets are $60 in advance and $75 at the gate

INFORMATION: reggaegenealogy.org