Jay Will Talks “15th Parish” – A New York City Dancehall Story
Videographer Jay Will believes that his new documentary 15th Parish will paint a bigger picture of Jamaican music globally.
“We want to bring awareness to reggae and dancehall, its roots, growth and how much further it can go. It’s a Caribbean story and we are storytellers. We wanted to tell the New York, and Shaggy, who is the executive producer of the documentary film spent a lot of his younger days in the streets of New York. We feel like it should be general knowledge about how significant and powerful these two genres are,” he said.
Fresh from a debut at the DOC NYC film festival, after being handpicked organizers, the 120-minute documentary is one of the 45 films to be shown between November 10 and 28 out of thousands of submissions.
15th Parish is directed by New Yorkers Ben Digiacomo and Dutty Vannier. Amy Hillcock, also from the Big Apple, shares the role of co-producer with Will. Shot in New York City and Kingston, the doc features real footage of Dancehalls and commentary from Reggae and Dancehall legends Sean Paul, Steely (from Steely and Clevie), Bobby Digital, DJ Kool, dancer/choreographer Tanisha Scott and Pat McKay, and others.
Jay Will recalled that Digiacomo and Hillcock drafted the idea to do the documentary years ago.
“They wanted to partner with Shaggy to get this story that they wanted to tell. They live in New York and they love dancehall and reggae. Even though they were in New York, they were influenced so much by reggae and dancehall music and by going to more of these events, they became even more fascinated,” Will said.
“They wanted to tell the story with our (his and Shaggy’s) resources, primarily our firsthand experience of being immersed in the reggae/dancehall culture,” he added.
In the early years, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall becoming increasingly characterized by faster rhythms.
With a career spanning two decades, Jay Will said his mission is still to get Jamaican and Caribbean music more recognized overseas.
“I want to continue to tell the story about the Caribbean, and not just Jamaican on a worldwide stage and get them at a level where we can compete with (our) international counterparts. My aim is still to showcase true Caribbean lifestyle and culture. The work never stops,” he continued.
Though 15th Parish just made its debut at DOC NYC Film Festival, the co-producer is hoping that it will be available on popular media platforms soon.
“At these film festivals, you have people from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and so on and look for and buy films that they want to show. We are hopeful that ours will be one of them. We’ve actually been in a series of meetings to try and arrange this,” he explained.