Jackie Mittoo
Keyboardist and arranger
- Browns Town, Jamaica
- 1960s to 1990
If you have heard a Studio One rhythm, you have heard Jackie Mittoo. A founding member of the Skatalites and then Coxsone Dodd’s musical director, he arranged and played on a staggering number of the tracks that became the common property of Jamaican music.
His organ playing is the opposite of showy: simple figures, held down, repeated, leaving room. That restraint is exactly why the rhythms survived being versioned for fifty years.
He moved to Toronto at the end of the 1960s and kept recording. He died in 1990.
Go and listen
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