Jamaican
music veterans are reunited for an acoustic session in a music doc ingrained with joy, intrigue and urgency
Potentially tricky territory here. Back in 2017, the white
British film-maker Peter Webber travelled to Jamaica to document a musical reunion destined to remind seasoned arthouse patrons of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club. The Inna de Yard sessions gathered reggae veterans on a rickety porch in Kingston to re-record their best-known standards acoustically – mirroring that unplugged tradition prevalent in
MTV circles almost since the electric guitar’s invention, while venturing a Jamaican analogue to the Great
American Songbook.
As one interviewee puts it: “Some countries have diamonds, some have pearls, some have oil; we have reggae.” As with all those resources, the spectre of exploitation has never been far away; Webber’s entirely disarming tactic is to allow the musicians to tell their own stories in their own words. Few require much prompting.