Soul Jazz Records Releases Rebel Island Soul, Celebrating 1970s Jamaican Funk and Reggae

John Holt covering Lou Rawls. Lee Perry and the Upsetters turning in something called "Bathroom Skank." The Chosen Few putting riddim to a Stylistics cut. These are the kinds of finds that make a Soul Jazz Records compilation feel less like a product and more like a crate-digger's argument in wax.

Soul Jazz Records released *Rebel Island Soul: Under the Influence — Reggae, Funk & Soul in Jamaica in the 1970s* on double LP (catalogue SJRLP597) and CD (SJRCD597), with street dates reflected across retailer listings. Crash Records lists the official street date as Friday, May 15, 2026, describing the package as "sixteen killer 70s reggae funk and soul cuts from the likes of John Holt, Lee Perry, Cornel Campbell, The Cimarons, The Chosen Few and more, featuring superb reggae takes on songs by artists including The Jackson 5, William DeVaughn, Diana Ross and The Supremes, War, The Temptations, Roberta Flack, The Stylistics and others."

The curatorial argument Soul Jazz is making here is pointed. Well-documented is the influence of American black music on Jamaican styles of the 1960s, from the birth of ska when The Skatalites ska-ified the jump-up southern USA rhythm and blues of Rosco Gordon, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, through to rocksteady when artists like The Techniques, The Paragons, Alton Ellis and The Melodians turned to the slower rhythms and soulful harmonies of The Impressions and The Drifters. What gets buried in that familiar story is what came next. Less-well established is that in the 1970s Jamaicans didn't stop listening to American black music styles, with many 70s reggae artists as invested in soul, funk and the proto-disco sounds of Philadelphia as was the case with rhythm and blues in the previous decade; while Jamaica promoted its own roots reggae styles around the world, powerhouse USA soul labels such as Motown, Philadelphia International and Stax Records were at the same time all popular on the island.

The sixteen-track sequence makes that thesis concrete. The tracklist runs from John Holt's take on "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" through Cornell Campbell's "Be Thankful," Elizabeth Archer and The Equators' "Feel Like Making Love," The Chosen Few's "People Make the World Go Round," Dave and Ansel Collins' "Single Barrel," The Now Generation's version of "Shaft," The Marvels' "Some Day We'll Be Together," The Darker Shades of Black's "War," Winston Curtis' "Private Number," Lee Perry and The Upsetters' "Bathroom Skank," Slim Smith's "Watch This Sound," Winston Francis' "Sitting in the Park," The Sensations' "If I Don't Watch Out," and Carl Bert and The Cimarons' "Slipping into Darkness."

That's a roll call of Motown, Philly soul, and Stax source material processed through a Jamaican lens, and the breadth of the artists doing the processing matters. John Holt, whose falsetto defined a certain strain of lover's-rock-adjacent roots, sits next to Lee Perry at his most Upsetter-era unhinged, which is its own kind of argument about the range of what was happening on the island.

The UK dimension of the story is also in play. Soul Jazz describes how "soul and funk-infused reggae in the 1970s united the sounds of Jamaica, USA and the UK into a highly-addictive cultural hybrid of styles." That unity had a specific UK expression: first-generation Caribbean-émigré children growing up in Britain with an equal love of soul and reggae, a cross-pollination that fed directly into the home-grown arrival of lovers rock in the mid-1970s.

Soul Jazz Records is a British label founded by Stuart Baker in 1991. Its reggae releases earned praise from figures including Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who called the label's "Dynamite!" compilations the "university of reggae." *Rebel Island Soul* fits squarely in that educational tradition, though its sixteen tracks are more likely to pull you to your feet than to a lecture hall.