Grammy Winner Brings Music Prowess to Worcester

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GRAMMY WINNER BRINGS MUSIC PROWESS TO WORCESTER

JASON SAVIO

Grammy Award-winning studio engineer Austin Green is in town and he’s looking to make music with the next generation of stars.

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Green has worked with some of the biggest names in the reggae and dancehall world, including his cousin Buju Banton, an internationally known reggae artist with whom Green won a Grammy in 2011 for his work on Banton’s Reggae Album of the Year, Before the Dawn.

Green was collaborating with his cousin under Banton’s Gargamel Records at the time of their Grammy win, but has since branched off on his own with his PayDay Music Group and has been involved in projects with superstars Rihanna and Drake. He’s currently re-strategizing and remarketing his brand because he says he has a list of songs he’s produced and recorded that he wants to release.

“What I’m trying to do is get people to understand what dancehall and reggae music is, the culture, the feel of it,” Green says. “It has already taken over New York, Miami, those places where there are more Caribbean people. I’m trying to bring it on mainstream in terms of production, dynamics and clarity, so that’s what I’m working on right now.”

The fourth child in a family of six children, Green is fiercely independent and has a work ethic that he attributes to his single mother who raised him and his siblings in Kingston on a “below middle-class” budget.

“She was a beast when it came to being a single mom,” he says. “She provided everything: morals, determination, work. She groomed her kids to be outstanding citizens.” Green has a brother who is an engineer with the army in Jamaica, and sisters who are teachers.

Green became involved in music when college became too expensive for his mother to afford and he decided to drop out to support his family. He started recording music with his friends at home while working at an airport. At the same time, his cousin Banton began to hit it big in the ‘90s. Between being loud with his music at home and working a job he wasn’t pleased with, Green’s mother had a suggestion for him.

“My mom said ‘you’re not enjoying the work (and) I don’t want you to be caught up in the street and guns, so why don’t I call Buju to come take you?’” he says.

Under Banton’s wing in 1998, Green started gaining experience with vocal recording and learning his way around a professional studio. He found himself working with “all the greats” right off the bat, such as Stephen Marley, Steely & Clevie, Sly & Robbie, and Tyrone Downey.

Bit by the music bug, Green returned to school at the Creative Production & Training Centre in Jamaica to study audio engineering while working for his cousin, because, he says, “audio engineering is very technical, you work with frequencies, you work with sound, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can make a real mess.”

Eventually his cousin would trust him to become more involved in the studio and start mixing songs, producing songs, playing keyboards and making beats. Green left the safety net of his cousin and Gargamel Records in 2006 to focus on his own label he was creating, PayDay Music Group. Green’s team up with reggae and dancehall deejay Bounty Killer led to tours around the world in the mid-2000s and collaborations with superstar T.I. (“I’m Straight”), Busta Rhymes (“Kill Dem REMIX”), Drake (“9”), and Rihanna (“BBHMM”).

“I was integral in most of (those collaborations), producing the vocals (and) recording,” Green says. “We did a lot of work combining the dancehall with the hip hop.”

He received a surprise phone call in 2011 telling him that Before the Dawn, an album he had recorded with Banton in 2006 but had not been released until 2010, had won the Grammy for best Reggae Album of the Year.

“When I got the message I was like ‘nah this can’t be real’ because we were past that, we were onto other things—I was onto other things,” Green says. “I was fully concentrated on my label, doing me.”

Green’s previous work on Banton’s albums Friends for Life and Too Bad had previously been nominated for Best Reggae Album, but didn’t win.

“It wasn’t just a feeling of … all my life’s work, this is the work that we put in,” he says about winning the Grammy. “I want the world to realize that Jamaica makes great music, and we’re coming from a whole lineage of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, all of these great artists, and we got it by reggae. At the same time, we were competing with Ziggy Marley and all those people, and we got it!”

Green is now in Worcester with his wife who was born and raised here. He says he was looking to expand PayDay Music Group and she suggested Worcester was the place to do it.

“Worcester is the perfect place for me to make music…in terms of uncharted grounds and new possibilities for me and my company to find brand new talent (in) any genre to work with,” he says. “Since Worcester is not a major hub like maybe New York, the possibility of turning Worcester in a growing hub (is) possible and I would like to be one of the front runners on that.”

Under PayDay, Green has worked as a producer and studio engineer on riddims—Jamaican rhythms, or beats--with genre artists Movado, Vybz Kartel and more. He has a long list of new music he plans on releasing in the near future that includes Sizzla Kalongi and Wayne Wonder.

Green is also game to work with and groom local artists.

“Whoever locally that can sing, can rap, guitars, I’m going to see if I can work with these people,” he says. “I’m willing to step up because I can produce any kind of music.”

You might think that someone who has already won a Grammy might not be as hungry as they used to be, but it’s quite the opposite for Green. If anything, he’s hungrier than ever before, and it all goes back to the work ethic instilled in him at a young age.

“What my mom told us, in order to be an individual that’s outstanding and progressive and forward-thinking, you have to get up and earn for yourself and then calculate all risks,” he says. “That makes you a man.”