"What's really touching me right now is the merging of all musics" says vocalist Jahdan Blakkamoore over the phone from New York. His new album Buzzrock Warrior is a master class in rock solid hybridization, digging deep into dancehall, hip-hop, and hard hitting beats from around the world. "In this time you have a lot of styles that came from reggae and dub music."
Equally proficient as a deejay (in the Jamaican sense), an MC, and a singer, Blakkamoore is deeply grounded in reggae, where he got his start 25 years ago. He first came to prominence within hip-hop circles earlier this decade working with DJ Premier, Smif N Wessun and other luminaries. This current project came about when he and his mate Matt Shadetek, head of pan-rhythmical blog/label Dutty Artz, started work on what was to be a mixtape, but just kept growing.
"It was a really easy process" Blakkamoore notes. "[Shadetek] is the bredren who reached out to the other producers that he knew were on that cutting edge, like Geko Jones and Rupture, and gathered the tracks from them. They presented tracks to me, which reflected where they wanted to go with it, and I just fell in line with that."
Having starred on this summer's Major Lazer record, he should benefit from its slipstream. After years of on the job research, Blakkamoore is realizing the exponential possibilities of mashing up the world's dance floors.
Equally proficient as a deejay (in the Jamaican sense), an MC, and a singer, Blakkamoore is deeply grounded in reggae, where he got his start 25 years ago. He first came to prominence within hip-hop circles earlier this decade working with DJ Premier, Smif N Wessun and other luminaries. This current project came about when he and his mate Matt Shadetek, head of pan-rhythmical blog/label Dutty Artz, started work on what was to be a mixtape, but just kept growing.
"It was a really easy process" Blakkamoore notes. "[Shadetek] is the bredren who reached out to the other producers that he knew were on that cutting edge, like Geko Jones and Rupture, and gathered the tracks from them. They presented tracks to me, which reflected where they wanted to go with it, and I just fell in line with that."
Having starred on this summer's Major Lazer record, he should benefit from its slipstream. After years of on the job research, Blakkamoore is realizing the exponential possibilities of mashing up the world's dance floors.
