First Cut: Coxsone

http://youtu.be/iegW2jGijVo

It's near impossible to measure how dramatic an impact someone like Clement "Coxsone" Dodd has had on the Jamaican music industry. Countless words have been both spoken and written about that impact but words can only do so much.

Nonetheless, his impact was massive. We'll just put it simply because we could only fail in trying to elaborate fuller.

It's a bit of a different First Cut this time round as we've gone back from the early reggae era and ended up with a track recorded in 1967. Hugh Godfrey's "A Dey Pon Dem" is a pretty standard rocksteady track, certainly nothing that stands out in a genre with so many classics but also far from being totally dismissible.

It's another case of: you want this one for the flip. The Soul Brothers, made up largely of members of the original Skatalites, put on yet another classic performance with "Take Ten". This is still very much a ska sound, with scintillating horns throughout.

We may not be the biggest fans of ska here at For The Suits, but every now and again you get an instrumental like this where you can't help but appreciate the quality of the players in it.

It's fitting a gem like this would be on this, seeing as Coxsone spent so much time dominating the ska era courtesy of the sheer quality he had at his disposal through working with the Skatalites. If there was one thing always to be guaranteed with a Coxsone cut it was that you knew the musicianship on it would be a cut above.