The Skatalites

Recorded live in 1983 on a two-track TEAC and God knows what else by a reconstituted bunch of originators, some of whom hadn't seen one another in a decade and wished it was longer, this forty-eight-minutes-a-side retrospective sounds better than the '60s studio rarities Top Deck compiled a few years ago and is a lot of fun to boot. We're talking party soundtrack for lazybones, the universal polka hop-and-shuffle of a thousand folk dances. Bump bottoms to "Confucius," "Fidel Castro," "Lee Harvey Oswald." (Grade - B+)