World Music Features

King Django runs the independent Stubborn Records label, and holds court in Version City—his recording studio based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Django has been committed to keeping up the flow with his monthly Version City parties at New York City’s Knitting Factory, and has just put the fi nishing touches on a new reggae project that explores his Jewish roots.

I started the label in 1992 after becoming disillusioned with the industry. I was pretty young and naïve, and a lot of people were promising me all kinds of things that always seemed to cancel each other out and leave me with nothing. I had always been inspired by people like Prince Buster, Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid and Lee Perry, so I took it as a great opportunity to start my own label. The first release was my band Skinnerbox’s first full-length CD Tales Of The Red, and after that I just kept releasing vinyl and CDs, with the emphasis on traditional ska and reggae, and particularly on recordings by my friends and associates.

I started the Version City label last year in partnership with Bertram Brown, who has been running Freedom Sounds since the 1970s. I’ve always been a big fan of “version” and riddim-based music and deejay styles. I had a great track that I produced with Johnny Osbourne over one of my Version City Rockers riddims called “Fortitude.” It’s very roots reggae, and I was looking for someone to co-release it with me who could get it into more of the roots reggae circles. I brought the tune down to Kingston and played it for Mr. Brown, and we pretty much started the label that day. Since then we’ve both been voicing artists on that riddim as well as a few other Version City and Freedoms Sounds riddims. They’re all new recordings featuring old-school artists as well as up-and-comers from Jamaica, New York, New Jersey and other distant locales.

Ska and reggae is what inspired me to become a musician and producer, so it will always be very important to me. I think the music that got popular in the ’90s as “ska” had very little to do with the music that we release. It had very little left of the Jamaican roots of the music, whereas those roots have always been the emphasis here. Stubborn is still a very small label, but we’ve been growing slowly and consistently the whole time. My philosophy has been to very selectively release projects that I really believe in and think will have lasting value, so our titles keep selling through the years.

It all started after the King Django’s Roots & Culture album came out in 1998. I was approached by Fred Feldman, who was running the Another Planet label, to make a Christmas record. I told him I’m Jewish, so he came back to me with the concept for a Jewish ska and reggae record. I had been exposed to Jewish music a lot as a kid, but very casually and in the context of the home. I went out and picked up a bunch of CDs of different kinds of Jewish music, and just listened to it all for a while. Yiddish was really the first language of the older generations of my family, so I had a strong grounding in it, and I was particularly attracted to klezmer music. I put a studio band together and we basically made an album of Jewish-tinged roots reggae and traditional ska. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Alicia Svigals [formerly of the Klez- matics] and Andy Statman, who are both incredible musicians and were kind enough to add their touches to the album. Later I was introduced to the Yiddish music scene through Klez-Kamp. There I was encouraged by Frank London of the Klezmatics to put a live band together and play the material out. Since then we’ve been playing shows on and off when everyone can get together. The new record is a product of the live band and a much deeper integration of Jewish and Jamaican music and themes.

The basic and most obvious thing is that they’re folk dance styles. The offbeat sensibility is very common to folk dance music across the globe, so it’s not that much of a stretch to mix any of these. Traditional ska and reggae defi nitely do gravitate toward minor keys and what is known as the “Far East” sound popularized by Don Drummond with the Skatalites. And the Soul Vendors’ “Swing Easy” is a version of “Fiddler On The Roof,” and is definitely one of the all-time standards in reggae to this day. If we look around we can see all different kinds of fusions happening around us, and as we become a more global culture this will only happen more. Maybe it’s not an especially natural fusion, but it’s so super-tasty!

I don’t think it’s a recent phenomenon. If you check the history of American reggae, you’ll see that there has been a strong Jewish interest and involvement for many years. Reggae has also been extremely popular in Israel for a very long time. Maybe more Jewish reggae artists are choosing to express their Jewishness overtly through their music now, but reggae is popular everywhere. You can fi nd reggae bands anywhere you go, and all different kinds of expression through reggae music.

Well, all Jewish, Christian and Islamic religion is founded on the teachings of Abraham and Moses—the Torah is what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. When I first got into reggae, I defi nitely noticed the Torah imagery and references, and it certainly spoke to me in a way that my conservative Jewish education had not. That being said, the Rastafarian understanding of Torah concepts is quite different. When I was younger, these links had a more obvious and direct infl uence on my writing. Nowadays, with the Roots & Culture band’s new recordings, I’m trying to focus on the connections in a more practical context—like how do the Torah teachings infl uence the culture of Rastafari, and how do I integrate Jewish and Jamaican music and thought into something that’s authentically reggae, authentically Jewish, and at the same time universal? I think possibly the most important underlying teaching and goal is the embrace of the entire human family in love and unity. That’s what I’m about.