Cut from a different cloth

The tailor-made tunes and soundsystem style of Toronto’s Tasha Rozez

A woman in the man’s world that is Jamaican soundsystem culture, Toronto’s Tasha Rozez is a force to be reckoned with. From the beginning, the mobile discotheque soundsys­tems that form the foundation of reggae music have been almost entirely male-dominated. But once Ms. Rozez gets on the mic and in front of a crowd, she challenges all assump­tions and expectations. Rozez has known to be ready for a fight from the beginning. “When I had my first contract,” she remembers, “I put a mission statement at the top that basically said, I’m the same as my male counterparts and I can do exactly the same thing that they do.”

What she does is play reggae music—from ska to one drop to drum & bass to dancehall to daggering. “I choose to play reggae music. It’s part of who I am. Some people may think that as a DJ, you shouldn’t pick one genre, but it’s very hard to really know about one thing if you’re playing everything. It’s like with school. I go to school and by the end of this year, I have to decide what I’m going to major in. You can’t be doing 29 minors. So I choose to major in reggae and dancehall.”

Travelling across the world to play tunes from Japan to Germany, Rozez is an ambassador for reggae music, but she’s also an ambassador for the soundsystem. It’s very important to Rozez that people “who have never experienced a soundsystem understand what soundsystem culture is all about.” It’s different from a club DJ, she explains. Getting on the mic is not just to hype the crowd. “There’s audience participation. I’m talking to you and I want some feedback. It’s about us all having a good time together as opposed to the DJ play­ing music and you’re just partying.”

And then there are the dubplates. Personalized and recorded specially for a particular soundsystem, these tunes are the bread and butter of any good sound. Rozez breaks it down—“It’s like getting a dress made. If you have your money and a design, the dressmaker will make whatever you tell them you want.

“You don’t want something that someone else has. You want to get something that’s a little bit different. I have to think really hard. It’s very important to know how to voice your dubplates. If everybody is playing a particular song on dub, that makes the song’s popularity decrease more quickly. And the dubplate is not an exclusive when everyone has it. Some­times I will really want a big tune, but at the end of the day, it will easily get played out. People will say, ‘Rozez, how you get that song?’ It’s because I have to dig deep in an artist’s collection to find a song that another sound wouldn’t think of cutting. I choose the unexpected, and it blows people out of the water.”

At Karnival this weekend with Poirier, Rozez will take Montreal to school. “You’re going to understand what a soundsystem is all about. We’re gonna have a little warm-up, we’ll get all stretched out, and then we’re gonna dance.” ■

WITH POIRIER, LADY SPLITZ, MIKEY DANGEROUS AND FACE-T AT LE BELMONT ON FRIDAY, OCT. 15, 10 P.M., $10

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