Vincent Chin

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Vincent "Randy" Chin (born October 3, 1937 in Kingston ; † February 2, 2003 in Fort Lauderdale , Florida , USA ) was a Jamaican record producer and entrepreneur. He founded the label VP Records .

Life

Vincent Chin was born in Kingston on October 3, 1937 , the son of a carpenter who immigrated from China to Jamaica in the 1920s . As a young man, he worked as a maintenance worker for jukeboxes in the service of the Syrian-Jamaican entrepreneur Isaac Issa from the early 1950s . This activity also included changing the plates. Chin was living with his family in Kingston's Vineyard Town at the time. He then opened in 1958 at the corner of East and Tower Street in downtown Kingston the record store Randy's Records and sold there first the discarded American rhythm-and-blues - Singles from the jukeboxes that he had collected, rather than throwing them away. The store was named after a Tennessee record store that sponsored a popular rhythm and blues radio show.

By the end of the decade, Chin began producing and releasing recordings by Jamaican musicians such as Alton Ellis and Eddie Perkins . Records had already been produced in Jamaica in previous years, but mostly Mento and Calypso were tailored to the tastes of tourists and the overseas market . Chin was the first producer to target the local Jamaican market. A first major success as a producer was the single Independent Jamaica by Lord Creator , which was released in 1962, the year of Jamaica's independence from the United Kingdom , on Chris Blackwell's label Island Records , which was founded a few years earlier . As a result, other significant works were created in the early 1960s in collaboration with Chin with Toots and the Maytals and the Skatalites .

The record store had already moved in 1962. At the new address 17 North Parade, on the one hand, the business premises could be enlarged, and in the following years Vincent Chin and his wife Patricia built their first own recording studio with a 4-track recorder on the floor above , which was fully operational from 1968 was. By the early 1970s, when reggae was taking off , Studio 17 had already become one of the better known in Kingston. In 1970 and 1971 Lee Perry produced dozens of songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers there , Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown also made recordings there, as did the American Johnny Nash . The studio continued to develop, they soon had a modern 16-track recorder, and Vincent Chin's eldest son, Clive, worked in the family business. This brought Augustus Pablo into the studio, who recorded his debut album This Is Augustus Pablo there in 1973 . The Chin family has also been involved in spreading reggae to New York since 1969 , where Vincent's brothers Victor and Keith ran a subsidiary of Randy's Records. In the course of the 1970s, the company acquired a plate press and also dedicated itself to sales.

At the end of the 1970s, due to increasing political unrest in Jamaica, Chin moved with his family to New York, where in 1979 a new store was opened in the borough of Queens under the name VP Records (V for Vincent, P for Patricia). The Kingston studio has been out of business since then, with only the record store on North Parade remaining in their possession until the late 1990s. Together with their children Chris, Randy Junior and Angela, Vincent and Patricia Chin developed VP into the largest reggae company in the USA and worldwide. In 1993 the label VP Records was officially founded, which is considered the most important reggae and dancehall label in the world ( see main article VP Records ).

Since the early 2000s, Vincent Chin has gradually withdrawn from the management, which he left to his wife and sons. He moved to Miami , where he built an offshoot of VP in Florida before his final retirement. Vincent Chin suffered from diabetes in the last years of his life and his health continued to deteriorate. He died on February 2, 2003 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida of complications from his illness.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Vincent Chin, 65 , Chicago Tribune News, February 11, 2003. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Chin, Vincent
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chin, Randy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jamaican music producer and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 2003
Place of death Fort Lauderdale , Florida , USA