SPIDER INK EP DEBUT

Spider Ink sound has influence from Jamaican Rocksteady

Songs written by Spider J Ettiene and Inkie Skyes

Track 3. L Sibbles

The Jamaican musicians and producers who developed rocksteady had grown up learning and playing jazz and had played through ska. In a similar way to what happened at Motown, the musicians responsible for playing this new sound would go jam in a jazz club after work.

Other influences were, most notably, American rhythm and blues – Fats Domino, Louis Jordan and many others –, mento, Calypso music and African drumming, as well. By the time rocksteady developed American soul music was popular, and that had an influence as well.

The tempo became slower with the development of rocksteady than it had been in ska.^[5] The guitar and piano players began to experiment with occasional accents around the basic offbeat pattern.

The slowing that occurred with rocksteady allowed bass players to explore more fat, dark, loose, slow tones than ska bass.^[6] The slower tempo and smaller band-sizes in turn led to a much larger focus on the bass line in general, which eventually became one of the recognizable characteristics of Jamaican music. In rocksteady, the lead guitar often doubles the bass line, in the muted picking style created by Lynn Taitt (as on “Run for Cover” by Lee “Scratch” Perry).^[7]