Various
Mento Madness: Motta's Jamaican Mento, 1951-56
V2 Music (www.v2music.com)

Ska usually gets the credit, but the homegrown Jamaican recording industry actually got its start when Kingston appliance dealer Stanley Motta opened his diminutive one-track studio in 1951 and began documenting mento music. Often called "Jamaican calypso," mento recalls the droll social commentary on the vagaries of everyday life and the risqué sexual innuendo of its Trinidadian counterpart. But in overall conception, and with its rural string-band roots, mento shares at least as much aural territory with the Creole brukdown music of Belize, the West Indian calypso of Costa Rica, Bahamian rake 'n' scrape, and early Louisiana zydeco. Mento comprises all of this, tempered with popular rhythmic and melodic influences from elsewhere in the Caribbean, England and North America, and an astute grasp of the ecumenical tastes brewing in the nascent north-coast tourist enclaves of Ocho Rios and Montego Bay.

Mento Madness offers 18 sundry tracks from Motta's MRS label, recorded in the early and mid-1950s, long before the Jolly Boys initiated mento's latter-day revival. Lord Composer and the Silver Seas Hotel Orchestra combine guitar, banjo, fife, maracas, clave, bongos and rumba box for a lowdown primitive sound ("Hill and Gully Ride/ Mandeville Road"). Lord Fly and the Dan Williams Orchestra fuse Cuban clave with a swinging tincture of New Orleans trumpet, clarinet, rhythm piano and scat chorus ("Blu-Lu-Lup," "Manassa with the Tight Foot Pants," "Medley of Jamaican Mento," "Swine Lane Gal/ Iron Bar," "Big Big Sambo Gal/ Mattie Rag"). Boysie Grant serves up a banjo-bongo-Dixieland twang ("Solas Market," "Linstead Market," "Sweet Charlie/ Mattie Rag/ Nobody's Business"), while Harold Richardson & the Ticklers essay the shack-a-lack groove of "Glamour Gal" (possibly the first mento recording) and delve into the metaphysical realm of Jamaican pocomania on a clarinet-dappled "Healin' in the Balmyard." Altogether, Mento Madness constitutes a splendid introduction to the music that preceded and informed Belafonte, ska and reggae. - Michael Stone

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