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Ska, dub bands a hit in Japan. 'E---verybody can do the ska.'

Posted by CaribShout on October 18, 2009 at 9:30am

Japanese ska band, Bon Deluxe, in performance recently in Kumamoto, Japan. (Photo: Holly Samson) You have no way of predicting what will or won't happen in your lifetime. But really, I had no idea of experiencing one of two recent 'firsts' in the context that I did, even though it's not quite surreal or even unbelievable that I did. The first of the firsts was seeing Mighty Crown, the Japanese sound system play. Not so out of this world. Mighty Crown has made a name for itself, and it is widely known that the Japanese are into Jamaican music. The place was a packed auditorium in Japan's southern Fukuoka City. With the selectors' mastery of patois, though interspersed with Japanese, and the audience's 'forwards' for any given tune, only consciousness separated this from a dance in Jamaica. The second of these firsts was seeing live ska and dub bands . in Japan. Like I said, it is widely known that the Japanese are into Jamaican music. But for a while, I'd thought that that was restricted to reggae and moreso the dancehall variety, until a few weeks ago when someone introduced me to the Fishmans, a Japanese dub band that was formed in the 1980s. My mind started to open up a little. Well, the irony is obvious. At least to me. Live ska and dub bands? In 2009? Perhaps it's my youth, but I associate ska with Sunday afternoons. I see it as an old kind of music that isn't made anymore. The stuff Mighty Crown plays you can hear on the radio any given day. But you don't hear a DJ say that a ska song has just dropped. Similarly, nobody gets down doing the ska in your regular Saturday night party. So when I saw an ad for a certain Chris Murray in concert in the comparatively small and rural Kumamoto City in southern Japan, I expected some kind of new age love song affair, not a full-on concert dedicated to a form that I thought only existed on records. Or at Rae Town on a Sunday night. Equally, when I saw ordinary guys walking around in T-shirts that say 'Dub Explosions' at the concert, I kind of didn't really expect that the music they play could be described as exactly that.

Mighty Crown The show had three acts - title act Murray, Dub Explosions and a ska band called Bon Deluxe, whose lead singer dubbed them a 'country band'. Dub Explosions opened with what seemed like their all - a truly engaging set, dedicated wonderfully as dub is, to drum, bass and contortions of sounds. Murray, a Canadian-born ska singer/guitarist, closed with a decent performance, which was punctuated with that distinctly Jamaican version of the word 'alright' - 'Aaright'! He even performed Peter Tosh's Mawga Dog and dedicated a song to the Skatalites. But it was the middle performers, the country band Bon Deluxe, who with a mixture of originals and covers, had the entire place moving. Murray even called them back on for a few numbers to close his set. Bon Deluxe, with their diminutive front man, had everybody dancing, even a few friends who had accompanied me, to music a couple of them had never even heard before. As it turns out, e---verybody can do the ska...!
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