Johnathon Kelly presents the Jamaican Music Atlas

Fifty years ago, Bob Marley and The Wailers performed for the first time in The Netherlands. That event took place on June 13, 1976 at the Jaap Edenhal in Amsterdam. Approximately 4,000 fans attended.

This is one of the stories Johnathon Kelly wants to educate people about through jamaicamusicatlas.com. That free platform was launched in early August and covers the history of reggae in 12 countries.

Using AI, Kelly gathered data in Jamaica, the music’s birthplace, as well as the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Canada, Panama, Japan, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria. Currently, the portal has a catalogue of 3,113 published records across nine eras; 129 stories, 202 mapped places and 728 videos.

Kelly, a Jamaican Information Technology expert who lives in Kingston, says jamaicamusicatlas.com will be constantly updated. He hopes it attracts reggae aficionados and the uninitiated with an interest in the music’s roots.

“I want to be upfront about this. This is not a finished, complete repository of Jamaican music history. Nobody could honestly claim that. What I did was start with a solid foundation, a set of records I researched and put in myself, covering the sound systems, the studios, the key people, the events that built this music from the ground up,” Kelly explained. “But I set a real standard doing it. Every fact carries a source. Every claim gets rated for how well it’s documented, whether it’s fully verified, community memory, or still contested. If two sources disagree with each other, I say so instead of quietly picking one. Nothing goes live until it’s been checked properly.”

The chapter on The Netherlands is a guided walk over 19 steps called ‘The Dutch Route’. That story starts in Paramaribo, Suriname from where thousands of people migrated to The Netherlands, former owners of the South American country.

It also looks at key reggae centres in the country including Amsterdam, and venues such as The Melkweg in that city; and the Ahoy in Rotterdam.

Kelly says compiling information for ‘The Dutch Route’ was dicey.

“The obstacle was never the research, it was the language. This scene keeps its records in Dutch, and some of them in Sranantongo and Papiamento, and the fullest history of it we could find would not be open to us at all,” he said. “We got Marley’s five Dutch dates out of the national newspaper archive anyway, from reviews printed the morning after. We still cannot tell you where he played on July 8, 1978, because two papers printed different answers on the same day and we can read both.”

In recent years, there has been a major attempt by Jamaicans to document their country’s music history. The Jamaica Music Museum in downtown Kingston is one example. Another are tours of that area conducted by the Kingston Creative organisation.

(Photo contributed)