The folks at Sanctuary have been busy beavers since they acquired the rights to the Trojan catalog; if you have a full-service record store near you, you've probably seen a couple dozen different box sets from Trojan in your reggae section. (UPDATE: Sanctuary was absorbed by Universal in 2007, so I guess Universal holds the rights to Trojan now.) Naturally, there had to be one dedicated to Christmas reggae, and this 2003 collection is it. There aren't a lot of surprises here, though; a fair proportion of the 50 songs on this three-CD set have already been mentioned elsewhere on this site, an indication that these songs have been compiled and re-compiled over the years. "Santa Claus Is Ska-ing to Town" by the Granville Williams Orchestra, for example, turns up pretty often. Still, fans will recognize a lot of folks on here, like Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Eek-A-Mouse, The Ethiopians and Lee "Scratch" Perry, not to mention The Maytals, presumably including Toots. The collection fills itself out in part by giving several artists multiple entries, among them Yellowman, John Holt, Jacob Miller and Ray I and The Tamlins. This set stands out because of its informative liner notes, which place the recordings between the mid-60s and late 70s and give some background to the individual artists. Like previous compilations, the recording quality of individual songs is all over the map, although it sounds as if it has been remastered, at least to my ears. If you don't have a lot of reggae Christmas music, this might just fill that hole in your collection. Still downloadable, but the hardcopy version is out of print.
Trojan Christmas Box Set, various artists (Sanctuary/Trojan)
The folks at Sanctuary have been busy beavers since they acquired the rights to the Trojan catalog; if you have a full-service record store near you, you've probably seen a couple dozen different box sets from Trojan in your reggae section. (UPDATE: Sanctuary was absorbed by Universal in 2007, so I guess Universal holds the rights to Trojan now.) Naturally, there had to be one dedicated to Christmas reggae, and this 2003 collection is it. There aren't a lot of surprises here, though; a fair proportion of the 50 songs on this three-CD set have already been mentioned elsewhere on this site, an indication that these songs have been compiled and re-compiled over the years. "Santa Claus Is Ska-ing to Town" by the Granville Williams Orchestra, for example, turns up pretty often. Still, fans will recognize a lot of folks on here, like Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Eek-A-Mouse, The Ethiopians and Lee "Scratch" Perry, not to mention The Maytals, presumably including Toots. The collection fills itself out in part by giving several artists multiple entries, among them Yellowman, John Holt, Jacob Miller and Ray I and The Tamlins. This set stands out because of its informative liner notes, which place the recordings between the mid-60s and late 70s and give some background to the individual artists. Like previous compilations, the recording quality of individual songs is all over the map, although it sounds as if it has been remastered, at least to my ears. If you don't have a lot of reggae Christmas music, this might just fill that hole in your collection. Still downloadable, but the hardcopy version is out of print.
No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: http://www.mistletunes.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/366
Leave a comment