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.
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