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This was the first ever sound system session I attended. It was in a youth club or sports hall (the Salle ALJT), down at the end of the metro line in Chatillon Montrouge, in the south suburbs of Paris. It was 31 Dec. 1993; I had missed my rendez-vous with a friend and was alone. The hall was full of smoke and gyrating bodies. I had never heard music like that before and had no idea how it all fitted together: the records, the mic men, the selector, the operator, the guy with the keyboard doing samples and fx all seemed to combine mysteriously into something extraordinary.
Anyway, as luck would have it I picked up a tape of the session a couple of months later at Blue Moon, the now defunct reggae record shop just off Boulevard St Michel. So here it is: a wicked juggling selection played by one of France's premier dancehall sounds. Being New Year's Eve, it opens with the sound of bells (Big Ben, I do believe) before busting into Beres Hammond's 'Fire'. After that it's pure classics (although at the time they were mainly brand new and fresh).
Stand Tall's selector was Polino: among the mic men were Daddy Nuttea, Daddy Mory, Moodirow and MC Janick. Nuttea went on to release an excellent mini LP, entitled simply Volume 1, and also collaborated with the Marseille hip hop crew IAM ('La 25eme image' among others). Mory was part of the celebrated Raggasonic along with Big Red and Frenchie (who now runs the excellent UK dancehall label Maximum Sound). Janick can be found on an interesting early comp of French hip hop and dancehall, 'Les Cool Sessions', produced by Jimmy Jay, MC Solaar's DJ, which came out around the same time as this session.
Stand Tall myspace
