DJ Biggs bridges reggae and Latin sounds through Katarock Sound

DJ Biggs and the new selector map

DJ Biggs is making Katarock Sound sound like a meeting point, not a border. The veteran selector, whose real name is Ohene Blake, has spent 40 years in the music industry, and his latest lane runs from reggae and dancehall into Latin rhythms that now sit comfortably beside the foundation.

Katarock Sound gives that shift real weight. Founded in the late 1990s by DJs Kat, Minor Bag and Cliff, the crew later gained wider prominence through the late selector DJ Quincy, and Biggs remains an active member of that legacy. What he is doing now shows how sound-system culture survives by adapting without losing its spine: keep the bassline steady, but let the crowd tell you where the set can travel.

From Guyana to Jamaica, with stops that shaped the ear

Biggs started DJing at 13 in Guyana, which already tells you this is not a casual hobby story. The selector’s ear was then sharpened further in the United Kingdom and Florida before he returned to Jamaica, carrying a wider sense of what different dancefloors want and how quickly tastes can shift when communities overlap.

That path matters because it mirrors the way reggae culture has always moved through migration and exchange. Biggs did not simply collect new genres along the way. He absorbed how scenes work, how audiences respond, and how a selector builds a set that can hold attention from the first pull-up to the final tune. In that sense, his career is less a straight line than a living example of reggae’s diaspora life.

Florida opened the Latin door

Florida’s Caribbean-heavy club circuit was the turning point in Biggs’s current sound. In that scene, reggae, dancehall and reggaeton were in demand, and that demand widened his ear beyond the Jamaican core into reparto, salsa, bachata and reggaeton. The result is not a rejection of reggae but an expansion of the selector’s toolkit.

That crossover is exactly what makes Biggs relevant to reggae fans paying attention to the broader dancehall economy. The music still leads, but the selector has to know how to read a room made up of Caribbean listeners, Latin listeners and everyone in between. Biggs has positioned himself inside that overlap, where a strong blend can connect communities instead of splitting them into separate corners.

A Cinco de Mayo set that blended, rather than separated

One of the clearest examples of that approach came at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Que Rico La Fiesta in St Andrew. Biggs played a mix designed to bridge Caribbean and Latin audiences, and that detail says as much about modern sound-system culture as any long interview could. The point was not novelty for its own sake. It was about making the room move as one.

That kind of set is increasingly important in nightlife spaces where reggae and dancehall no longer exist in isolation. Biggs’s work suggests that the selector’s job now includes translation as much as selection. He is not just dropping tunes, he is deciding how reggae, Latin and Caribbean rhythms can sit together without flattening any of them.

The old sound-system method still runs the show

Biggs’s catalogue was not built in a vacuum. He refined it by testing songs in live venues, then adjusting based on the reactions of patrons and owners. That is classic sound-system practice in a modern setting, where the dancefloor is still the most honest critic in the room.

This is also where the deeper reggae tradition comes through. UNESCO describes reggae as music that emerged from marginalized communities in Western Kingston and notes that it blends earlier Jamaican forms with Caribbean, North American and Latin strains. It also stresses that reggae’s functions as social commentary, catharsis and praise remain intact. Biggs’s approach fits that history neatly: he is not diluting the form, he is extending the conversation around it.

Why Katarock Sound still matters

The broader story reaches back to Kingston’s 1940s street-party scene, when sound-system crews used trucks, generators, turntables and large speakers to create a mobile public culture. That foundation helped shape Jamaican performance life, then spread outward through the wider Caribbean and beyond. Biggs is working in that tradition, but his route through Guyana, the United Kingdom, Florida and Jamaica shows how far the culture now travels.

That is what makes Katarock Sound such a useful case study. Biggs stands inside a long Jamaican lineage while actively responding to the realities of borderless nightlife, where reggae, dancehall, reggaeton and other Latin Caribbean forms keep colliding and blending. The bridge he is building is not a side project. It is the present tense of sound-system culture, and it is still moving to the pulse of the crowd.