Jumpy Record

Feel Like Jumping by Marcia Griffiths is a perfect slab of baked in the sun pop-reggae. In 1968, a few years before she was one of the I Threes, providing backing for Bob Marley and The Wailers during his imperial, ubiquitous phase, she was a young hopeful, given the chance to make her own mark on Jamaican music. Signed to the mighty Studio One and produced by Coxsone Dodd, Feel Like Jumping was written by Griffiths’ partner Bob Andy, so prolific a writer that you might call him the Lieber AND Stoller of that early reggae scene.

Marcia Griffiths – Feel Like Jumping

Breezing along on a wave of jaunty, rasping brass and Motown-ish ‘woo-hoo-hoos’, Feel Like Jumping has the same great 1, 2, 1-2-3 bassline that first appeared on The Ethiopians Train To Skaville, powered Toots and the Maytals’ 54-46 Was My Number and, 20 years later, would pop up again, sampled and looped by Double Trouble to form the bedrock upon which the Rebel MC proved just how Street Tuff he was. I’m sure Paul Simonon was more than familiar with the rhythm and feel of its ten note pattern as well. Sped up, it wouldn’t sound out of place on any of The Clash’s more caustic ramalamas. Slowed down, it makes the ideal anchor for dub.

Griffiths does a brilliant call-and-response vocal with her backing singers, la-la-laing and woo-hoo-hooing her way throughout the record as the band plays head-noddingly and disciplined behind. Clipped guitars, barely-tickled hi-hat, that joyful vocal loud and centre. If music had facial features, Feel Like Jumping would be a big, round, smiley face.

Griffiths’ backing band was effectively a version of The Skatalites, known by 1968 as Sound Dimension, Studio One’s in-house version of The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers. In their own right, Sound Dimension cut some brilliant instrumental records, like the whacked-out dub of Granny Scratch Scratch…

Sound Dimension – Granny Scratch Scratch

If Talking Heads hadn’t been listening to this before coming up with Slippery People I’ll eat my oversized white suit in shame. C’mon Byrne, ‘fess up.

As much as they were a crack unit worthy of their own album release, the musicians in Sound Dimension were encouraged more to provide the backing tracks for Studio One’s solo stars – Marcia, John Holt, Ken Boothe, Dennis Brown and others. Any of those artists’ records from 1967 onwards – Young, Gifted And Black, Ali Baba, Everything I Own, Money In My Pocket – songs that you will know, love and play on repeat – feature the combined, tight ‘n taut talents of Sound Dimension.

I go through phases of playing reggae and ska non-stop (usually at the first sign of sunlight) then sicken myself to the point where I send it all back into hibernation again. It’s always the perennial Feel Like Jumping that pulls me back in and has me turning the bass notch on my amp clockwise an extra notch or two. Here we go again.