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Nothing as sweet as pum-pum |
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Saturday, 19 April 2008 |
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Of all the varieties of Jamaican yams, nothing beats the taste of the pum-pum yam.  It used to be that there were two seasons in the year - crop season (also known as crop time) and hard time. Crop season stretched from December through June and hard time stretched from July through November.
Crop season was defined by the growing season for yams. Nowadays farmers plant yams year-round, especially with the recent dispersal of the round-leaf variety of the yellow yam. Back in the day though, farmers didn’t have access to this hardy variety of the species. The planting stocks that were available to them were the varieties that were passed down to them by the ancestors. The varieties which I remember are affu (often referred to by its more sophisticated appellation, yellow yam), tau yam, Saint Vincent yam, renta (Bajan) yam, mozella yam, negro yam, yampy, hard yam, soft yam, white yam, sweet yam, and Lucea yam.
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Wednesday, 16 April 2008 |
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What was deemed impossible has now been accomplished. A new piece of software can modify the individual notes of a recorded chord. Peter Neubäcker, a former German guitar maker turned programmer, has unveiled the software called Direct Note Access. His company, Celemony Software, demonstrated the capabilites of the program last month. Users of the program will, for the first time, be able to analyze the digitized sounds of guitar or piano chords, or even multi-instrument recordings, and then extract and modify individual notes. Previous to this piece of software, studio engineers, with the help of programs like Melodyne, also from Celemony Software and Auto-Tune , were able to change their pitch and edit individual notes in polyphonic audio material. But teasing apart notes recorded simultaneously, as in a six-string guitar chord, has never before been practical.
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Toots: reggae from its roots |
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Friday, 11 April 2008 |
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 When it comes to reggae music, there are still a few performers on the road who can boast of having been around since the genre's early days.
Only one of them can rightfully claim to have named the genre. Toots Hibbert formed The Maytals in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1962 as a ska group. The Maytals had a number of Jamaican hits, but their 1968 Hibbert-penned single "Do the Reggay" propelled "reggae" toward the mainstream.
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