Ninjaman X Chromatics in 1996 Kingston

Sexy girl X Bab…need I say more? See photographs of Mariah (the dancer) HERE

Filmed Sept. 3, 2011, this video features the founder of the infamous Jamaican killing sound Killamanjaro – Mr. Harper (‘Papa Jaro’) – cutting a dubplate at Jaro headquarters on Whitehall avenue in Kingston, Jamaica.

Think I found a new haunt in Bed Stuy. Check them out: 364 Lewis Ave (between Halsey St & Macon St), Brooklyn, NY

I was near Times Square when the news that America’s most wanted had died. At first I thought it was just another guess by some expert that he was probably already gone because of his known medical problems; but then I read that he’d actually been killed.

I turned on my laptop and began looking for a live video feed, eventually landing on Al Jazeera, which confirmed the messages lighting up my phone – ‘Osama Bin Laden is dead’ – killed by United States special forces in a small operation in Pakistan.

Venturing into the street, a crowd had begun to gather near a window with a large television, on which US President Barrack Obama appeared and confirmed the news.

The last time I was in this place when a major news story broke was when this same President had been elected, but tonight things were a different form of triumphant.

As the crowds gathered and people began to cheer and sing, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of nervousness about being in this place. Although America’s great enemy was finally dead, he suddenly seemed more alive than he had ever been.

See the rest HERE

In 2000, the majority of Jamaicans (in Jamaica) were still not online but that was the year that me and record executive Josef Bogdanovich connected the island’s vibrant music scene to Internet audiences via ‘Kingston Signals’ – the first Jamaica-based web program to broadcast live (and uncensored) from the turntables of hardcore soundsystems to broadband from the island – 3 hours per day, 3 times a week, for 2 years.

It was during the days of Kingston Signals that I first picked up a digital camera, primarily as a means of providing a rapidly growing online audience with up-to-the-minute visuals to go with the incredibly raw sounds that were emanating from the turntables in Kingston.

In this collection of clips filmed in 2001, former Killamanjaro frontman Ricky Trooper is seen performing as all the sounds did – in a small studio space in the basement of Globe Furniture on Constant Spring road…the first home of Downsound Records in Kingston.

Edgy Pete…now scarf and beard and iPad friendly…

http://www.peterdeanrickards.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – walking around in the rubble on Grand Rue, one gets the distinct feeling that people are putting on a brave face. Three months after the earthquake that took the lives of more than 200,000 people, life continues despite the indescribable destruction as its residents continue the painstaking process of rebuilding the capital – arguably the most important cultural and historical city in the Caribbean.

Coming from Kingston, the scenes of poverty are not entirely alien, and yet, despite its obvious economic disadvantages there’s something distinctly developed about the Haitian people. Amid the piles of broken concrete, trash and flattened buildings, there’s no begging, no wailing, no time for anything but digging upward and outward for the inhabitants of this rebel nation.

On Grand Rue I follow the unconquerable Melinda Brown to the studio of her fellow artist Andre Eugene. Brown’s got some bad news to tell the sculptors who’ve gathered there: their visa applications to visit Jamaica have been rejected. While Brown has received no official explanation (yet) as to why some of Haiti’s most respected visual artists were denied entry to Jamaica, one can’t help but feel a sense of shame as she relates the news to the disappointed faces.

“We’ll find out why and try again in June,” Brown tells the artists she handpicked to create a one-of-a-kind testimonial to the Haitian cataclysm aptly titled The Trembling Heart.

The Australian-born Brown is no stranger to the process of rebuilding places that most people would never tread. Back when the Meatpacking district in New York City still had rampant crime, fish guts and beef blood running in the streets, Brown was running Bombora House. Years later she arrived in downtown Kingston where she set about doing the same in places like Church Street and Rose Town.

Months before the earthquake, Brown had been noticeably missing from the Kingston landscape as she had begun working with sculptors and artists from Port-au-Prince and Grand Rue. For Brown, the Haitian earthquake was no ‘hot charity’ – she was in the narrow alleys of Grand Rue long before the tragedy of January 12.

Back into the streets I follow Zaka, a 22-year-old filmmaker (and primary translator for us hopelessly monolingual Jamaicans) who was just granted a US$10,000 artist residency at the prestigious Vermont Studio Centre in the United States.

As we walk through a tent city and the remnants of a destroyed church, Zaka tells me about the people he lost and the chance for renewal: “Grand Rue can be a symbol to world,” he says with almost bizarre confidence, “a chance to show how the people of Haiti can create good from so much destruction.”

SEE FIRST for the full set of photographs.

Its Girl Friday time on FIRST.