Known for its seriousness, the Pressure Sound label has spent the last ten years digging through the archives of Jamaican music to reissue little-known gems. The work is arduous, and most of the tracks on this compilation are in fact hard-to-find vinyl records, digitised and remastered (sometimes with their flaws), the original recording media having disappeared. The booklet explains in detail the origins of each selected cut. The tracks are therefore logically presented like 45s, A-side and B-side, with a dub or instrumental version for most of them. Only the excellent The winner by Barrington Levy, taken from a maxi-single, appears in its showcase version with the song and dub run together.
Even though the selection draws mostly on the 1970s, the choice of artists is fairly heterogeneous: little-known artists rub shoulders with somewhat forgotten hits such as The way it is by I Kong, produced by Tommy Cowan, Three meal ticket, an anthological track by Cornell Campbell, the second, self-produced version of Jah Jah mi horn ya and Chuck it by the deejay Dillinger, on a version by Rod Taylor. We also discover a young Michael Rose, still looking for his style on We shall over come, produced in New York, a superb, brassy version of Skyjack by Bongo Gene and a magnificent Curtis Mayfield cover dating from 1972 by an original Uhuru (not yet "Black") made up of Garth Dennis, Duckie Simpson and Don Carlos.
Let us also note an instrumental offered in two versions, Free for all by Tafari Syndicate (Little Roy), which was for a long time the background sound of the Pressure Sound website, and an adaptation of Death in the arena by the Mercenaries for the Techniques label.
The quality is thus obviously there on this "Straight to the head, vol 1", which calls for a follow-up that we await impatiently. As the CD booklet recalls, the people behind Jamaican music did not always have the means to archive their output and make it available to future generations: this short-term view of musical development therefore imposed a real race against time to beat oblivion. For ten years now, Pressure Sound has been one of the spearheads of that fight. Happy anniversary, and hats off!
