Toasters
Ska Jerk
The link between Jamaican music and US Soul and Blues is of course very strong. I am a huge fan of Stax/Volt, Motown, Chess Records and contemporaries which I consider to be the bedrock of pop music and whereas everybody hears about the more obvious big band influences on SKA such as Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Boots Randolph, Louis Armstrong.....less people are aware of the link to soul and R+B artists like Chuck Berry, Etta James, King Curtis, Rosco Gordon and so on. The great Lester Sterling once told me that he based the whole idea of the horn chop (or "upchuck" as some people like to call it) on what the guitar player was doing on the Yakkety Sax track. If you listen to that you will definitely hear the ska beat. All these songs were mixed by myself over the course of different project sessions. The Ska Jerk recording is actually post the DLTBGYD album sessions and was originally intended for a compilation project that eventually never came out, so that track has just been languishing in the Toaster vaults. At that time we had been hired to do quite a bit of film and TV scores as well as commercial jingles for the likes of Cisco, Coca Cola, AOL, Miller Beer, etc. and so the band was tight, often incorporating guest members from the greater NYC SKA massive and we were able to turn around a complete mix like that in just one day. The engineer on SKA JERK was George Evagelou who also worked with me on the Edna's Goldfish record. - Robert "Bucket" Hingley of THE TOASTERS