The previous album, “Smoke” was the first part of a musical trilogy documenting Rice’s attempts to combine rocksteady and samba. The next release containing these experiments will see the light of day in mid-May. Listen to the first single.
It was a very hot edition of the Freedom Sounds Festival, still at Gebäude 9. The organizers opened all the doors, but during the shows you didn’t feel the airflow. Given these conditions, it was good to slow down a bit. Jamaicans came up with this already in 1966, when they turned ska into rocksteady. And that is a genre Victor Rice loves.