VIA PRESS RELEASE | Gathered together for one unforgettable night in 1988, reggae legends and rock royalty spanning two generations met at historic Fort Charles, Jamaica for a musical event that would reverberate around the world. A Reggae Session, impressively captured by ten cameras, featured Jimmy Cliff, Toots Hibbert, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, Sly & Robbie, and Bunny Wailer performing their greatest hits, alongside talented chart-toppers such as Santana, The Neville Brothers, and Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders and local bands such as 809 Band, Solomonic All Stars, and Dallol and Oneness.
In A Reggae Session, Bunny Wailer delivers electric versions of “Roots, Radics, Rockers and Reggae,” and “Rise and Shine.” Ziggy Marley, son of the Kingston-born icon, performs a pulsating “Conscious Party,” which was from his first album which had just been released when the concert was filmed. The Pretenders’ Hynde, steps lively on “Waiting in Vain,” and “Steppin’ Razor,” in tribute to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Grace Jones, whose return to her native Jamaica for the concert marked her first performance there in more than a decade and was greeted with a hero’s welcome, delivers a rousingly fun “My Jamaican Guy.” Toots Hibbert lays down a high-energy Jamaican version of John Denver’s “Country Roads,” and a memorable call and response “5446 Was My Number,” which commemorated Mandela’s years in prison (5446 was his inmate number) during the harshest years of that country’s oppressive apartheid rule.
The Neville Brothers, joined by Carlos Santana on guitar, thrill with two passionately performed songs, “My Blood In South Africa” (again echoing the worldwide movement underway in 1988 that ultimately brought about the end of apartheid and began the long and ongoing process of reconciliation in South Africa) and “It Ain’t No Use.” Finally, Jimmy Cliff brings along his own fire-eater for his then newly released “Hanging Fire,” and the show’s stars all join him onstage for the finale, “The Harder They Come,” and there is unbridled joy and celebration among the performers and entranced audience.
A Reggae Session, a Delilah Films production, produced by Stephanie Bennett and Albert Spevak and directed by Stephanie Bennett and Thomas D. Adelman, originally aired in the U.S. on Cinemax, as part of the legendary “Cinemax Sessions” series.
