Pitchfork

Reggae. Canada.

If that doesn’t seem like a logical pairing to you, you’re hardly to be blamed, but since the mid-1960s musicians from Jamaica and other West Indian nations carved out a scene for themselves in Toronto-- Canada’s most populous city. The music they made wasn’t all reggae-- many of these musicians also helped create Canada’s funk and soul scenes-- but nearly all of these Jamaicans, Barbadans, St. Vincentians, and Trinidadians had a background in ska, rocksteady, or reggae.

What developed in Toronto was not entirely unlike what happened in the West Indian communities in London (England, not Ontario)-- immigrants far from home creating something familiar. And the reggae names who showed up in Toronto-- either for extended stays or brief cameos-- weren’t exactly small potatoes. No less a figure than Jackie Mittoo-- the organist who helped define the very basis of reggae with the Skatalites, Soul Vendors, and Sound Dimension-- split time between Kingston and Toronto, operating an Ontario record store with Lord Tanamo and cutting records in both cities. Jackie Opel, Johnny More, Alton Ellis, Lloyd Delpratt, and Johnny (aka Johnnie) Osbourne are all here, but no one had a bigger role than guitarist Wayne McGhie, who wrote six of the 16 songs on this compilation and played on at least seven of them.

The material compiler Kevin “Sipreano” Howes and Light in the Attic have unearthed runs the gamut from hard funk to deep soul, reggae, soul jazz, and rock, and most of it is excellent. Jo-Jo Bennett puts on a clinic in throat-shredding soul on Jo-Jo & the Fugitives’ “Fugitive Song”, but the group betters itself on the funky, McGhie-penned “Chips-Chicken-Banana Split”, a song that slides into a sweet pre-“Cold Sweat” James Brown groove stuffed with stabbing horns and rapid-fire backing harmonies. Bob and Wisdom check in with an amazing cover of Mac Davis’s “I Believe in Music” that really sells the idea of music as a salve for problems with sharp two-part harmonies, and McGhie’s short-lived band Ram mines the same funky rock ore as Sly Stone and Rare Earth on “Love Is the Answer”.

Delpratt and Osbourne each contribute instrumentals-- the organ and horns of Delpratt’s “Together” flow gorgeously, while Osbourne’s “African Wake” is one of the deepest roots tracks in the set. Noel Ellis, son of the great Alton Ellis, also heads for the roots on his blessed-out “Memories”, a song from 1983 that falls outside the timeframe of the rest of the set but feels like it belongs in its spot late in the running order as an arrow forward.

As great as all these songs are, there’s one particular track that stands out: The Cougars’ cover of “I Wish It Would Rain”, a Whitfield/Strong/Penzabene composition originally recorded by the Temptations. Though it has some rhythmic echoes of reggae in places, this song is so oddly arranged that it feels completely out of time or genre. The verses are minimally arranged, with Jay Douglas and Jackie Richardson trading leads over heartbeat drums and a lone, regular guitar chord. Smears of organ color the front and back of each verse, and there are two bridges of instrumental soul that rip right into the starkness of the verses with towering horns and thick bass. It’s an improbable interpretation, but it’s utterly haunting.

Jamaica to Toronto is an interesting artifact for a few reasons. The quality of the music is obviously the most important of these, but there are some great storylines here as well. The free mixing of English-speaking West Indians in Toronto, the exodus from the poor environs of Jamaica (many of these musicians were from Montego Bay, across the island from Kingston, reggae’s ground zero) to Canada in search of a better life, and the creation of a northern micro-Jamaica where music was currency that bought you memories of home all have resonance as themes of their own. Jamaica to Toronto tells all of these stories through music, and they’re all worth hearing.