In 1979, the Montreux Jazz Festival launched a revolution with its first Reggae Night. At the time, with the exception of Bob Marley and the Wailers, reggae, with its swaying rhythms far removed from Afro-American soul standards, was still the preserve of a few London clubs specializing in ganja and Caribbean music. Bob Marley is still almost an unknown, but the night promises to be spectacular with Steel Pulse, then Dennis Brown and his band,and finally Peter Tosh with the rhythm section of Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar.

Dennis Brown, despite his 22 years, is already a veteran and one of the most popular roots reggae artists of the late 1970s, along with Gregory Isaacs, with a series of remarkable records in his luggage ⁽¹⁾.

A few years later, we met Dennis Brown again, still as powerful as ever, at an open-air reggae festival in Winterthur.

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⁽¹⁾ In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked Dennis Brown 67th among the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time