Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the offbeat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads. Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods:
… Read more the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk; and third wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.
2 tone is a genre of ska music that fused traditional Jamaican ska music with elements of punk rock and new wave music. Its name derives from 2 Tone Records, a record label founded in 1979 by Jerry Dammers of The Specials, and references a desire to transcend and defuse racial tensions in Thatcher-era Britain. Many two-tone groups, such as The Specials, The Selecter, and The Beat featured a mix of black, white, and multiracial people. It was part of the second wave of ska music and it influenced the third wave ska and ska-punk movements. The two-tone sound originated among young musicians in Coventry in the West Midlands of England, who grew up listening to 1960s Jamaican music.[5]
… Read more They combined influences from ska, reggae, and rocksteady with elements of punk rock and new wave. Bands considered part of the genre include The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, Bad Manners, The Bodysnatchers, and Akrylykz. The Specials' keyboard player Jerry Dammers coined the term "two-tone". Dammers, with the assistance of Horace Panter and graphic designer John "Teflon" Sims, developed the iconic Walt Jabsco logo (a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, pork pie hat, white socks, and black loafers) to represent the two-tone genre. The logo, based on an early album-cover photo of Peter Tosh, included an added black-and-white check pattern.