Deep Hit Music

  The mystique and sensuality of Leroy Gomez’s iconic saxophone riff that opens 1975’s Darkest Light has paved the way for some of the biggest hip-hop artists of the modern day – but little recognition is given to the band who are responsible. Forming in Roosevelt, a suburb of Long Island, NYC in 1971, The Bobby Boyd Congress borrowed from the break-beat ridden, groove-laden ‘funk’ that was quickly consuming the black American music scene in the late sixties, thanks to the likes of pioneers James Brown and the psychedelic-come-RnB of Sly and the Family Stone. The Bobby Boyd Congress’s response to the expansion of funk throughout the US was to relocate to Paris, where they would gain recognition within their circle and change their name to the Lafayette Afro Rock Band - their gigging haunt Barb è s, a Parisian district with a large population of North African immigrants, inspired them to incorporate typically African instrumentation and beat tendencies into their songs, fusing the

  Photographer - unknown Island music and has always found its way into the UK’s music hotspots since ska and rocksteady first emerged onto the scene. As reggae evolved from these early Jamaican styles, the British youth found themselves swept up in bass culture and the dance-inducing pop tones of lovers-rock reggae, as well as the combative militancy of the likes of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Peter Tosh, who’s protest songs soundtracked the Windrush generation’s sons and daughters’ struggle against police oppression. Areas populated by kids of West Indian descent during the late seventies and early eighties – Brixton, Hansworth - latched onto this invasion of reggae, which influenced a subculture of first-generation British born West Indians to emulate the sounds of their favourite Jamaican artists. While London’s Ashwad and Matumbi were products of this new musical movement, Birmingham was birthing the likes of the legendary Steel Pulse, Musical Youth, UB40 and The Beat, bands who’s sk