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One Matrix Story of Note

The years of 1960-1962 were very important for Jamaican music. In the UK, The Blue Beat and Island labels began releasing relatively large numbers of Jamaican recordings. This gave commercial momentum to a fledgling, perhaps somewhat shaky new music industry in Jamaica by opening a new, wider market abroad. As the UK market begins to respond to these somewhat exotic new records, the producers’ initially tentative approach to this new market gradually develops over time into a virtual dependence on the export business. Matrix numbers sometimes provide clues to how early efforts to expand the market for Jamaican music were first developed.

It is during those pivotal early Ska years that Jamaica music first begins to gain notoriety and public attention abroad. To find their niche in the UK market the key producers in Jamaica attempted to consolidate and exploit their work abroad as much as possible. By the time the music begins a change to Rocksteady in 1976, the relationships between Jamaican producers and music business executives in the UK were well established and some of those partnerships would go on to last as much as twenty or thirty years. Chris Blackwell played a key role important for opening the door to greater exposure for larger numbers of artists, producers and records than might otherwise have been possible. It was Blackwell who hand carried many of the earliest Jamaican recordings abroad to have stampers made before there was any facility on the island to make them.

Those stampers, or copies of them, would be carried back to Jamaica where pressing machines manufactured the labeled, vinyl singles from those metal parts. Studying the database, we find the first titles from Jamaica to debut on the UK Island label in the early sixties are actually alternate stampers to those same titles and while both came out in Jamaica, only one of the two issued JA stampers also had a UK release. In those very formative years, Jamaican pressings with an obvious UK counterpart typically had a die-stamped matrix number indicating a metal stamper most likely made abroad. We cannot rule out entirely the use of the die-stamped numbers in Jamaica, but it appears likely that most of those would be of UK origin despite the local pressing in Kingston.

Here are Jamaican matrix numbers for the first releases on the Island UK label in 1962 –noting alternate local stampers that we believe were also released that same year.

Island Records UK: