Reggae Rhythm Update is a music program that is available on-demand. You can listen now or download the mp3 files to your hard drive. Then you can listen at your computer, transfer the shows to your portable music player, burn them to CD, or whatever else you can think of to make listening convenient to your schedule. Each show is announced and available on the main page. You can also subscribe to the podcast for free and be notified when new shows are added.

As you may or may not know, a good percentage of Jamaican music releases are based on the musical arrangements (or “rhythms”) of past hits. For example, a producer will choose a particularly memorable or long-forgotten Jamaican hit and either sample the original or hire new musicians and programmers to replicate the original bass line and the other musical parts — all in an effort to rework the original arrangement while adding that producer’s unique vision of the rhythm update. Current singers and dee-jays (Jamaican rappers) are brought in to voice brand new songs on the re-worked rhythm. Although the batch of songs will be new, the rhythm will be familiar to fans of Jamaican popular music and are more likely to achieve hit status. Two of the biggest recent examples are Sean Paul & Sasha’s update of “I’m Still In Love With You” which was originally sung by Alton Ellis at Studio One in 1967, and Lily Allen’s “Smile” which utilizes a sample from the Soul Brothers featuring the late keyboard player/arranger Jackie Mittoo, “Free Soul.”

Since 1996, I’ve been maintaining a database that not only stores artist, track, and other information from all of my reggae CDs, but also indicates which songs are based on hits of the past. I’m a rhythm junkie. Some might say I’m a rhythm nerd. As I identify these rhythms, I put together a show and present you with my findings. The podcast is a literal Reggae Rhythm Update and I use the show as an outlet to present the music to the best of my abilities.

The show is produced at the Golden Touch studio in New England, USA. It is recorded live to disk with little to no post-production.