Only You Going Back To Cali

Going Back to Cali - Armenian Version

Laslow

Robert Gordon at Telephone

Sounds from Tuesday afternoon

Pony Ride

Ras Jahson, the founder and lead vocalist of the Roots, died of heart failure after a show in San Francisco.

"He just fell asleep on me," shruged his then 21-year old son Jahmal somberly. "It was a very peaceful, heavy thing. After this really good show, he just passed away."

Before becoming a fixture on the West Coast reggae scene, in the early '70s Jahson was a New York City drug counselor, who, intending to stay only two weeks on vacation to Jamaica, fell in love with the island's most representative feature, its music, and ended up staying for three years.

"He was heavily into jazz in New York, [he was] not a musician really, but a vocalist, you know; he scatted around a little. But reggae became the love of his life," explains Jahmal. "He truly felt it was his duty to expand it to America. He invested all his money into records and dub-plates and came here. Actually," his son laughs, "he was escorted right to the plane because of faulty papers."

Upon returning stateside, Jahson, whose Christian name is long lost in that great tradition of exchanging a tired life for a more native persona, formed the first incarnation of Strictly Roots. "He just started a band with the eight or nine people he was living with at the time in New Mexico. They all played terribly," says Jahmal, rolling his eyes. "The drummer had never played at all and none of them had ever been to Jamaica."

Arriving in Sonoma County in 1986, Jahson and Strictly Roots honed their chops locally and on the festival circuit, adding considerably to the perception that Northern California is perhaps the most fertile region in the country for launching the careers of reggae acts, Big Mountain and Inka Inka being the most recent and noticeable phenomena.

DJ DST

Popular tracks