This article is about the Jamaican musical style. For the DC Comics character, see Mento (character). For the candy, see Mentos. For Roman people named "Mento", see List of Roman cognomina.
Mento is a style of Jamaicanfolk music that predates and has greatly influenced ska and reggae music. It is a fusion of African rhythmic elements and European elements, which reached peak popularity in the 1940s and 1950s.[2] Mento typically features acoustic instruments, such as acoustic guitar, banjo, hand drums, and the rhumba box — a large mbira in the shape of a box that can be sat on while played. The rhumba box carries the bass part of the music.
Mento is often confused with calypso, a musical form from Trinidad and Tobago. Although the two share many similarities, they are separate and distinct musical forms. During the mid-20th century, mento was conflated with calypso, and mento was frequently referred to as calypso, kalypso and mento calypso.[3] Mento singers frequently used calypso songs and techniques. As in calypso, mento uses topical lyrics with a humorous slant, commenting on poverty and other social issues.[3] Sexual innuendo is also common.
History
Mento draws on musical traditions brought by enslaved West Africa people.[3] Enslaved musicians were often required to play music for their masters and often rewarded for such skills.[3] The Africans created a creole music, incorporating such elements of these traditions, including quadrille, into their own folk music.[3][4]
The Jamaican mento style has a long history of conflation with Trinidadian calypso. The lyrics of mento songs often deal with aspects of everyday life in a light-hearted and humorous way. Many comment on poverty, poor housing, and other social issues. Thinly veiled sexual references and innuendo are also common. Mento can be seen as a precursor of some of the movement motifs and themes dealing with such social issues found in modern dancehall. It became more popular in the late 1940s, with mento performances becoming a common aspect of dances, parties and other events in Jamaica.[4]
The word mento is of uncertain etymology; it may be from an African language or Cuban Spanish; Rex Nettleford said the term was brought back from Cuba by Jamaicans returning from work there.[5] Supposedly, it derives from the Spanish verb mentar, "to mention, call out, name", because of the subtle ways that lyrics criticised people (whether fellow blacks, or the whites who were in charge).[6][7]
Due in part to Belafonte's popularity, mento became widely conflated with calypso in the 1950s. In a 1957 interview for Calypso Star magazine, Lord Flea said:
In Jamaica, we call our music 'mento' until very recently. Today, 'calypso' is beginning to be used for all kinds of West Indian music. This is because it's become so commercialized there. Some people like to think of West Indians as carefree natives who work and sing and play and laugh their lives away. But this isn't so. Most of the people there are hard working folks, and many of them are smart business men. If the tourists want 'calypso', that's what we sell them.[9]
This was the golden age of mento, as records pressed by Stanley Motta, Ivan Chin, Ken Khouri and others brought the music to a new audience. In the 1960s it became overshadowed by ska and reggae. Mento is still played in Jamaica, especially in areas frequented by tourists. Lloyd Bradley, reggae historian and author of the seminal reggae book, Bass Culture, said that Lee "Scratch" Perry's seminal 1976 dub album, Super Ape, contained some of the purest mento influences he knew.[10] This style of music was revived in popularity by the Jolly Boys in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the release of four recordings on First Warning Records/Rykodisc and a tour that included the United States.[4]Stanley Beckford and Gilzene and the Blue Light Mento Band also revived rural mento in the 2000s. The mento dance is a Jamaican folk-form dance with acoustic guitar, banjo, hand drums and rhumba box.
Films
1984 – Caribbean Crucible. From Repercussions: A Celebration of African-American Music series, program 6. Directed by Dennis Marks and Geoffrey Haydon
Sources
↑ Johnston, Richard (2004). How to Play Rhythm Guitar, p. 72. ISBN0-87930-811-7.
↑ Kauppila, Paul (2006). ""From Memphis to Kingston": An Investigation into the Origin of Jamaican Ska". Social and Economic Studies. 55 (1/2): 76. JSTOR27866458.
Neely, Daniel (2007). "Calling All Singers, Musicians and Speechmakers: Mento Aesthetics and Jamaica's Early Recording Industry." Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4. (December 2007), pp.1–15.
Neely, Daniel (2008) "Mento, Jamaica’s Original Music": Development, Tourism and the Nationalist Frame. Ph.D. diss., New York University.
Jamaica - In Calypso: A World Music, a site created by Historical Museum of Southern Florida about calypso and mento
Jamaican Mento Music - site created by Michael Garnice (comprehensive information on the history and the musicians who made the music)
Ivan Chin - Mento music's pages on mento pioneer Ivan Chin. The Mento dance is a Jamaican folk form dance with the instruments acoustic guitar, banjo, hand drums and the rhumba box
Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first popular song to use the word reggae, effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as by American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument.
Calypso is a style of Caribbean music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago during the early to the mid-19th century and spread to the rest of the Caribbean Antilles by the mid-20th century. Its rhythms can be traced back to West African Kaiso and the arrival of French planters and their slaves from the French Antilles in the 18th century.
The music of Jamaica includes Jamaican folk music and many popular genres, such as mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub music, dancehall, reggae fusion and related styles.
Ernest Ranglin is a Jamaican guitarist and composer who established his career while working as a session guitarist and music director for various Jamaican record labels including Studio One and Island Records. Ranglin played guitar on many early ska recordings and helped create the rhythmic guitar style that defined the form. Ranglin has worked with Theophilus Beckford, Jimmy Cliff, Monty Alexander, Prince Buster, the Skatalites, Bob Marley and the Eric Deans Orchestra. He is noted for a chordal and rhythmic approach that blends jazz, mento and reggae with percussive guitar solos incorporating rhythm 'n' blues and jazz inflections.
The music of Bermuda is often treated as part of the Caribbean music area. Its musical output includes pop singer Heather Nova, and her brother Mishka. Collie Buddz has also gained international success with reggae hits in the US and the UK.
There are several subgenres of reggae music including various predecessors to the form.
Afro-Caribbean music is a broad term for music styles originating in the Caribbean from the African diaspora. These types of music usually have West African/Central African influence because of the presence and history of African people and their descendants living in the Caribbean, as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These distinctive musical art forms came about from the cultural mingling of African, Indigenous, and European inhabitants. Characteristically, Afro-Caribbean music incorporates components, instruments and influences from a variety of African cultures, as well as Indigenous and European cultures.
Byron Lee and the Dragonaires are a Jamaican ska, calypso and soca band. The band played a crucial pioneering role in bringing Caribbean music to the world. Byron Lee died on 4 November 2008, after suffering from cancer for a sustained period.
Count Ossie, born Oswald Williams, was a Jamaican Rastafari drummer and band leader.
Lloyd Knibb OD was a Jamaican drummer who is considered Jamaica's most important and influential modern drummer. A master percussionist, he contributed to every style of this nation's popular and not so popular musical forms, including jazz, mento, burru, nyabinghi, rock steady and, by extension, reggae. He is most well known for his contribution to the development of the rhythm of the ska. He played for The Skatalites, and for Tommy McCook & The Supersonics. Knibb recorded for the producers Lloyd "Matador" Daley and Duke Reid.
Joseph Abraham Gordon, better known as Lord Tanamo, was a Jamaican-Canadian singer and songwriter best known for his mento and ska work.
Bruno Blum is a French singer songwriter, guitar player, music producer and musicologist sometimes nicknamed "Doc Reggae". He is mostly known for his work in the reggae, Caribbean music, rock music and African musics fields, and also works as a cartoon and comic book artist, illustrator, painter, photographer, video director, writer, journalist, music historian, interpreter and speaker.
Lord Flea was the stage name of Norman Byfield Thomas, a Jamaican mento musician credited with "helping start the calypso craze in U.S." With his band The Calypsonians, Flea toured America throughout the late 1950s, and released an album on the Capitol label. The band also performed in two calypso-related films.
Kenneth Lloyd Khouri was a pioneering Jamaican record producer and founder of Federal Records, the first recording studio in Jamaica, which was sold to Bob Marley's Tuff Gong record label in 1981. He is credited by reggae historians for the birth of rocksteady in the 1960s. Rocksteady later mixed with Jamaican mento, a genre in which Khouri also had a pioneering role, leading to the creation of reggae music.
Count Lasher was the stage-name of Terence Parkins, a Jamaican singer and songwriter. Born in the mountainous parish of Saint Thomas, Lasher predominantly utilized first rural, and then urban mento styles in his music, although in later years he recorded some ska and reggae singles. Successful and prolific in output, Count Lasher remains an overlooked figure in the history of Jamaican music.
Augustus "Lord" Messam was a Jamaican mento singer who performed throughout the 1950s up until the mid 1960s. With his band, Messam released several records that consisted of a mixture of original and traditional material on the Stanley Motta record label, under the name Lord Messam & His Calypsonians.
Dennis Sindrey is an Australian-born calypso, mento, Jamaican shuffle and ska singer, songwriter and guitarist.
Stanley Motta was an electronics store proprietor who established a record label in Kingston, Jamaica and opened the first privately owned recording studio in Jamaica in 1951, jump starting Jamaica's music industry.
Pop 'n' Mento is the third album by Jamaican mento band the Jolly Boys, released in September 1989 by American label First Warning and British label Cooking Vinyl. The album was produced by American singer-songwriter Jules Shear, who discovered the Jolly Boys performing in a Port Antonio hotel. He digitally recorded the group in one take, using a minimal set-up to accommodate the group's acoustic instruementation. The record features a set of mento standards, and mixed elements from the genre's past with contemporary sounds.
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