Personally, I consider ACTION IS TIGHT to be the FIRST SOCA SONG RECORDED. At the time that I asked ROSE to autograph THIS ALBUM she told me that it was worth $100 -- way back in 1993. But I think that it is worth a SPOT in a CALYPSO MUSEUM!!!
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Action is Tight Calypso Rose
Lord Shorty - Endless Vibrations ( Classic )
SocaPhD
4 years ago (edited)
Even though Shorty was experimenting with improving and modernizing calypso music before this "Endless Vibrations" hit by fusing soul with calypso in 1972 in a track called "Soul Calypso Music" and fusing East Indian instruments with Calypso in his 1973 hit called "Indrani", it was this 1974 recording and release that brought all his experiments together where he arrived at the main successful formula upon which Soca music was built with contributions by many other top T&T musicians and artists as the Soca explosion took place during the 1970s.
This "Endless Vibrations" track was recorded at the KH Studios in Trinidad that was one of the most popular and modern studios in Trinidad during the 1970s. Brass arrangements on this track were done by Ed Watson, the rhythm arrangements were done by Shorty and the backing band used was the Art DeCoteau Orchestra.
The following year 1975 Shorty came up with the name Sokah for the new age Calypso music that he was doing and introduced the name he carefully pondered about and came up with to many of T&T's top musicians while they were recording tracks for his "Sweet Music" album at the same KH Recording Studios where this "Endless Vibrations" hit was also recorded.
At the same time that Shorty introduced the name Sokah to other top T&T musicians he also defined Sokah as the Soul of Calypso rather than as just a fusion of Soul and Calypso as there are many other musical elements in Sokah music including the East Indian drumming element that helped inspire Shorty to change from using the traditional calypso beat that was popular at the time to his new fusion style Sokah beat...
However after Shorty did an interview about his new Sokah music genre with popular media journalist Ivor Ferreira, Ivor miss-spelled the word Sokah as Soca in his newspaper article about Shorty and the new music genre he had introduced. The article on Shorty was titled "Shorty Is Doing Soca" and it was the "Soca" spelling that most of the T&T public first saw in writing in the media which quickly became the more popular spelling and stuck.
Ivor Ferriera did try to correct his error by doing an album review for Shorty on the back cover of his next album called "SOKAH Soul Of Calypso" recorded in late 1976 for 1977 but by this time the "Soca" spelling had become very popular with the general T&T public and was also being used by most of the other artists who started to contribute to the rapidly growing soca music genre.