Studio One was the university
Almost everybody who mattered in Jamaican music passed through one building on Brentford Road. What came out of it is still the common language the whole music speaks.
Clement "Coxsone" Dodd
Producer and label owner
- Kingston, Jamaica
- 1950s to 2004
Coxsone Dodd ran a sound system before he ran a studio, and he started recording because he needed exclusive tunes to play on it. That is the whole logic of Jamaican music in one sentence.
Studio One, on Brentford Road in Kingston, became the place almost everyone passed through. The Wailers, Burning Spear, the Heptones, Alton Ellis, Horace Andy, Dennis Brown and dozens more cut records there, over rhythms played by house bands whose work is still being versioned fifty years later.
Dodd’s reputation as a businessman is complicated, and plenty of the artists who made his catalogue great saw very little from it. That is part of the history too. What is not in dispute is that the rhythms which came out of Brentford Road are the closest thing this music has to a common language.