When others slept, he sang, finding his voice in those early morning hours when most voices have fallen silent.

As a little boy, Don Carlos used to sing for his father.

He still remembers those late nights, recalls them with a warmth evocative of summertime in his native Jamaica, even though 60 years have passed.

“From the time I was like 3, my dad used to tell me, I used to go sing,” the 66-year-old Carlos says. “I remember when I was like 5, 7, I used to get up in the night and sing for my dad. My dad was a tailor. He used to make pants. He used to sew right through the night. I used to see him working and sing to him.

“When I started to sing, people would tell me, ‘Yeah, you’ve got a good voice,’ ” he continues. “They used to tell my mom, ‘That boy’s going to be a singer.’ The music was just given to me. I don’t know how I do it.”

Return to the Desert

Carlos will dig deep into that songbook of hits at the 18th edition of Reggae in the Desert, Vegas’ biggest annual celebration of Caribbean music, culture, art and food.

He’ll be joined on the bill by familiar faces in headliners Sly and Robbie, the well-traveled Jamaican rhythm section and production duo who worked with Black Uhuru on many albums. They’ll perform with Carlos’ fellow Black Uhuru veteran Mykal Rose.

The lineup also features roots reggae favorites Alborosie & The Shengen Clan, Yellowman, Jesse Royal and others.


​Read more here:
​ http://bit.ly/2QQzRUp​


Direct Link to Website and tickets:
 http://reggaeinthedesert.com/index.html

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Cops in Anza, California, raided over 100 illegal cannabis farms this Wednesday, the second major raid against black market weed growers to happen in the course of a week.

Police served 80 search warrants on illegal pot grow-ops within hours after a murder was reported on one of these farms. Cops reportedly showed up in full combat gear with rifles. They left the area with helicopters and trucks overflowing with tons of seized marijuana, which is now slated for destruction. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said that he had been planning these raids for months, and was hoping to shut down at least 200 illegal growers by the end of the day.

"With common cartels and gangs and grows that are protecting themselves from thieves, that comes with guns and gunfights and shootings and robberies," Bianco said to ABC 10News. "This isn't a victimless crime. This is not a pretty little plant that we're taking, someone's medicine, this is a quality-of-life issue that is destroying this valley.”

Residents of the Anza area have been growing weed there for years, and many of these farmers hoped to gain approval from local authorities to do so legally. Riverside County recently created a new regulatory framework for legal cannabis cultivation, but local farmers have complained to the county Board of Supervisors that the complex licensing process is too difficult for them to navigate.

The board has yet to approve any commercial grow permits, leaving many farmers to decide to flaunt the law and keep on growing without a license.
The county's Cannabis Regulation Task Force has been cracking down on these illegal grows since last fall. Six weeks ago, cops chose the celebrated stoner holiday of 4/20 to launch another raid against illegal farmers, seizing several tons of contraband cannabis. 

“We treated 4/20 a little different,” Bianco wrote on Facebook. “Yes, there is a new Sheriff in town.”

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2HYfHFg​

When it comes right down to it, cannabis has tons of medicinal uses – and there are probably hundreds more that we are not even yet aware of because studies on the plant are so limited. However, this doesn’t stop many researchers from trying to learn all they can with the data that is available. Thanks to a specific group of researchers at the University of Colorado, we now know there could potentially be a link between cannabis use and an increased chance of surviving a heart attack.

“Perhaps the most striking finding of our study is that marijuana use prior to AMI was associated with decreased in-hospital mortality post AMI,” the study authors wrote.

Researchers used hospital records of patients who suffered heart-related emergencies or acute myocardial infarctions (AMI). The records went back as far as 1994 and spanned almost a decade through 2013 – and of the 1,273,897 patient records, 3,854 admitted to cannabis consumption. Chances are, the actual number of cannabis consumers was higher, but due to marijuana’s illegal status not everyone is as open with their doctor as they should be when it comes to their cannabis use.

Originally, those conducting the study hypothesized that cannabis users would suffer from more negative effects after being admitted to the hospital – but it turned out quite the opposite was true. They found that those who use cannabis were at a decreased risk of going into shock and were less likely to need certain artery surgeries. The study also found that cannabis users were at a decreased risk of dying from complications.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2WIP3Z9​

Music takes us back to a formative time, to a younger potentate version of ourselves. Music reminds us of who we were, who we are, and who we still want to be. Music captures a zeitgeist, a moment-in-time, and in an instant we are transported – mind, body and soul – to that day on the beach, that night at the prom, or that afternoon cruising in the car, new license in hand, breeze in our hair and the radio blaring.

Music keeps us young. I was a teenager, hanging out in my bedroom, listing to the Beach Boys. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was on the record player. It was a steamy summer day. The windows were open. I could see my next-door neighbor, the very cool Jimmy Russo, hair slicked back, walking down the street. Strange as it sounds in these days of anything goes, but I still blush when I remember hearing the song’s lyrics for the first time.

The brain loves music. It heightens our intelligence. It makes neurons fire and neurotransmitters light up. As we revisit defining moments of life through music, the brain’s pleasure center is turned on, and we experience the warm glow of neural integration and hemispheric communication, supporting optimal mental health. In a scientific study looking at music’s impact on brain function, Canadian researchers discovered that music is actually part of the human survival instinct. Describing the experience of listening to music in terms like, it sent “shivers-downthe-spine” and feeling “chills,” researchers found that music facilitates biological changes in heart rate, respiration, and electrical impulses of muscles, and affects cerebral blood flow in brain regions thought to be involved in reward, motivation, emotion, and arousal. Music makes the brain come alive.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2Mrpckm​

Easy vibes, good beats and a celebration of reggae culture starts off the year of music at the Queen Mary as it sails into the second year of its partnership with concert giant Goldenvoice.

The 2019 concert season at the ship begins with the return of the One Love Cali Reggae Fest, which expands to three days as it takes over the Queen Mary Events Park in Long Beach Feb. 8-10.

It’s the first of what’s expected to be several mini-festivals at the 15,000-person capacity venue this year produced by Goldenvoice, which announced a partnership with Urban Commons, the ship’s leaseholder, in late 2017 to put on more large-scale music festivals at the ship .

And they delivered by bringing several ew concerts and taking over some of the existing festivals in 2018 like One Love Cali Reggae Fest.

This year the reggae fest feature more than 50 bands performing throughout the weekend including well known headliners such as Rebelution, Slightly Stoopid and Sublime with Rome.

But with so many acts it would be easy to miss some of the artists that are either up-and-coming or have flown under the radar and may not be as well-known as the headliners.

So One Love co-promoter and talent buyer Jared Segawa shared his top picks via email for the bands beyond the headliners that you don’t want to miss at the three-day festival.

Read more here: ​https://bit.ly/2GcMXbV

Mitch Santell (Producer) and Scott T. Brown (Co-founder) at One Love Calif Reggae Festj in 2018

But reggae? Oh, it’s deader than Bob Marley. You get the occasional single from one of Marley’s sons, but that could just as easily play on the pop/rock radio stations. In fact, they do. But before that… what? Maxi Priest? UB40? As much as I like the early work of both of those artists, their success was founded mostly on the commercial, rather than the rebel, tip. And the only radio exposure they receive now, if any, is on urban classics and college stations. It’s safe to say that the only real survivor of reggae’s heyday are dreadlocks, which now ironically signify wealth and celebrity, rather than the hairstyle of the oppressed.

Many (most?) people probably can’t recall the position of strength that reggae was in during the early to mid-70s. It was being championed and covered by mainstream artists such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones for its unique musical structure — a combination of gospel, jazz, R&B and soul. Its very real outlaw reputation didn’t hurt; many of today’s rappers would curl into the fetal position or head for the mean streets of Beverly Hills if dropped into that era’s slums and shantytowns. The 1972 film The Harder The Come influenced a generation of legitimate bad men, wanna-be gunmen, and singers much the same way Scarface would a decade later. Of course, the soundtrack of the former is legendary and still remains one of the essential single-album documents of the genre.

Reggae, like rock, was birthed from a more folksy tradition, in this case mento and calypso. That gentle, largely acoustic music would give way to ska — a more upbeat, dance-oriented music of the 1950s — in a striking metamorphosis similar to how country, blues, folk and “race” music would deliver rock & roll to the youth culture of America and, eventually, the world. Ska was characterized by its walking bass line and rhythms concentrated on the upbeat. It also brought to bear a much faster tempo which demanded dancing. But trends — and teenagers — often have a short attention span and a desire for something new, and music mythology also points to the very hot temperatures in the Caribbean in the mid-1960s as a dominant factor in the evolution of Jamaican music. The sweltering heat produced a slower tempo for both the musicians, and patrons of dancehall and yard dances, the story goes, and thus rocksteady. Perhaps my favorite era of Jamaican music, rocksteady would sadly be a very short, albeit highly influential, “blip” on Jamaican music’s radar, eventually ceding to what we would know as reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s.

As Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism and black consciousness started to spread in Jamaica, the music again shifted. Nyabinghi drumming and chants started to work their way into Jamaican music, along with a professed love for the sacred herb of marijuana, a desire for repatriation to Africa and the acceptance of Haile Selassie as the second coming of God on earth. To most Jamaicans, Rastas were the bottom rung of the social ladder, confined to the countryside and ghettos of Kingston. However, their revolutionary beliefs soon infiltrated musicians and the music scene, and the golden age of “roots reggae” was soon underway. A young Bob Marley, along with bandmates Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, embraced the movement, growing their locks out, and eventually putting an acceptable — and commercial — face on Jamaica’s ghetto music to Western pop culture.

There were exceptions, of course; Bob Marley and The Wailers, Third World, and The Gladiators were self-contained bands. Marley, of course, would become the biggest reggae star in history, and a cottage industry after his premature death at age 36 of cancer. However, it is worth pointing out that black America never really embraced Bob Marley, or reggae music in general, a fact that, according to Ziggy Marley, the reggae king “had (an) issue with, because he wanted African-Americans to hear his message.” Many might argue that the death of reggae began with the death of its superstar, and it’s true that it would never reach the heights, nor produce as magnetic a presence as Bob Marley. But other things that would change both the music and culture of Jamaica were already underfoot.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2R0ahuz​