The tradition & historical record
2 min read · 1 sourceSka (; Jamaican Patois: skia, [skjæ]) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento (sometimes referred to as calypso) with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads. Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk; and third-wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ska”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
ska is music genre from Jamaica in the 1950s, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. 1
The source record links this tradition to 35 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. 1