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CD contains bonus DVD. Liner Note Authors: Peter Dalton; Trevor Williams; Roger Dalke; Rob Chapman; Steve Barrow; Lloyd Bradley. Photographer: C.S. Dodd. Studio One Story is an extremely ambitious and unusual multimedia release, devoted to documenting the history of Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One, one of the most important (perhaps the most important) reggae labels. Housed in a standard CD-sized two-disc box set, it's a combination DVD and CD, with a fat book of liner notes to boot. Certainly the component that will garner the most attention is the DVD disc, which contains no less than four hours of film footage. About three-quarters of the DVD is devoted to a film on the history of Dodd and Studio One, featuring extensive interview footage with Dodd and numerous artists he worked with, including Dennis Alcapone, Ken Boothe, Alton Ellis, Sugar Minott, engineer Sylvan Morris, studio musicians, and others. The remainder of the DVD contains more than an hour of bonus interview footage that didn't make it into the main feature film. The CD disc has 16 classic Studio One recordings, representing styles from ska and rocksteady to dub, with tracks by major artists like Ellis, Minott, the Heptones, the Skatalites, Lone Ranger, and Jackie Mittoo. On one hand, the DVD in particular is a valuable document, especially considering that reggae is rarely given such serious and comprehensive documentary treatment. On the other hand, it's not optimum as entertainment, though it's worth slogging through for anyone seriously interested in the music's development from the 1950s through the 1980s. On the plus side, most of the figures interviewed, particularly Dodd, have a lot to say about Studio One's contribution to reggae. The scope is admirably wide, reaching back to Dodd's days in the 1950s as a sound system operator importing American R&B records through the construction of his studio and his development of innumerable artists, the Wailers being the most famous. Dodd was also an entrepreneur whose influence on Jamaican music was not limited to his studio productions, as he was also a label owner and sound system operator, and ran several music shops in Kingston. Factors that make it tough to watch all three hours at once, though, are the languid pace of the footage, in which some clips are just scene-setting glimpses of Jamaican life, or in which the camera just follows Dodd and friends around as they revisit some old dancehalls. The patois of the interviewees will be hard to follow for many non-Jamaican viewers, though, remarkably, English and French subtitles are provided; even if you think your ear for patois is good, those English subtitles will probably prove to be very helpful, if only to ease the comfort of comprehension. More importantly, the Studio One story (and the story of reggae as a whole) is convoluted enough that it can be difficult to follow the tale's growth without a strong background in reggae history. This is where the accompanying 92-
