photo: thom bleasdale

We’ll be honest and come clean ahead of time and admit we don’t know much about reggae here at Jenkem HQ. My personal reggae collection on iTunes consists of Bob Marley’s greatest hits, the Cardiel mix and a Horace Andy album my cousin showed me the first time I was ever around people smoking weed, and pretty much nothing else noteworthy.

So to get more acquainted in the ways of Jah, we hit up Tommy Sandoval (who shares his personal vinyl collection almost daily on Instagram) and asked him to pass us a playlist with some gems for us all to listen to.

Not gonna lie, sourcing some of these files was a bit tough. Some were vinyl exclusive releases that are only available in the UK and other things like that, so we had to do a bit of finessing and bootlegging to grab all the tracks Tommy listed out. Whether it was ripping an mp3 of a vinyl rip hosted on YouTube, or “hacking” an audio hosting site to download the source file of a free preview, we did what we could.

Thankfully, our DJ/mixer Mike Bloom knows a lot more about this shit than we do and was able to mix this together like a real head and actually make it sound good. Hopefully it was worth the trouble.

Stream it below, and, if you’re into it, make sure you download the mix here while you can.

More Mixes? Check out: Bill Strobeck, Blondey McCoy, Louie Lopez, Nora Vasconcellos, Alltimers, Rodrigo TX, Stefan Janoski, Franky Villani, Pass~Port skateboards, The 69 Mix, Beagle, LurkNYC, Bam Margera, Mike Arnold, Jason Sallilas, or Kevin Rodrigues.