Posted on 04/18/2008
Music documentaries are tricky things to get right.  The performances shown have to be of strong songs as opposed to popular fads of the time, while at the same time the peripheral images have to be striking as well.  It also operates as a time capsule, and so the documentary has to try to effortlessly show the disappeared or subsumed musical world as it once was.  Deep Roots Music 3 is a roughly edited, weed-tinged example of this.

Volume three of this series collect two differently paced episodes on late-seventies/ early-eighties Jamaican reggae culture: the more hectic and political "Money In My Pocket", and the calm, more insular "Ghetto Riddims".  "Money..." gives a look at the movers and shakers of reggae at the time, at once showing the famous One Love concert, Bob Marley leaping around the stage, asking the two political party leaders to hold hands in unity. But this series is not content with giving you the water-shed moments, it wouldn't work as a doc if they did.  Instead, we get long takes of a record honcho hustling for more product; an interview with an endearingly naïve Marcia Griffith on singing and its usage for her people, and a quiet and near-magical interview with Dennis Brown as a wide-eyed chap, his shining and affable face glowing as he talks and sings songs, including a fragile rendition of the fifties American standard "Autumn Leaves".

    "Ghetto Riddims" deals mostly with recruitment.  It shows a man with a portable studio as he goes literally searching through the pocked streets of Kingston for the next great one. Singers also auditioned in the back-yards of the super-producers of Jamaica.  In such rare footage, the producer is none other than Jack Ruby, whose accomplishments include Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey album.  Trios and duos line up with cheap guitars, all of them looking like the day-workers, vendors and thieves that populate the streets, but their voices are sweet, nervous, perhaps honest.

    Truthfully more information about the artists could have been provided instead of the ernest island narration, but there is an arresting interest that comes from seeing such clear, uninterrupted early reggae.  To see this, especially knowing that these things cannot be reproduced (Dennis Brown dies in 1999, Jack Ruby in 1989) shows that history itself is a gift of some sort.

- Christopher White