MusicRadar

Bob Marley's best of album Legend released in 1984 three years after his death, has sold over 20 million copies and is the best selling reggae/Jamaican album of all time. It puts the small Dodd's studio - Jamaican Recording and Publishing Company Ltd - known as Studio One into this roundup.

Not because that album was recorded there, on equipment which in the 1960s was generously described as primitive (one-track), but because this studio allowed Marley and other Jamaican musicians like Toots And The Maytals in their early days to develop distinctive styles and sounds that mattered to them and were globally influential, and still are today.

Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd opened his studio at the back of his parents' shop in 1963. He had been a migrant cane cutter in the southern US and acquired wide music knowledge and an amplifier and a turntable and became a mobile DJ on his return to his home island!

The Studio One sound became virtually synonymous with the authentic Jamaican sound of ska, rock steady and reggae.

It's all about fusions and evolution. Desperate for a musical cultural identity after independence, Jamaica has happily absorbed and reinvented from every culture around to give us ska (fast beat, shuffling rhythms) followed by rock steady (slower with more electric instrument driven) followed by reggae (R&B, rock 'n' roll, soul and calypso), followed now by rapping and any number of hybrids without which the contemporary scene would be empty.