Check out the The Fader’s recent interview with Dylan Powe on the weekly West Kingston dance party Passa Passa.

The real person who started Passa Passa was my cousin O’Neil Miles, the operator of our family sound system, Swatch International. What happened was, after the first Reneto Adams raid in 2001*, Tivoli people stopped going out. There was war and political friction going on and West Kingston became a more insular community. A lot of people weren’t coming there to party and people weren’t leaving to go party. My family has a business down there from the early 1950s, a drug store. Wednesdays downtown closes half day and the roads become less busy. So O’Neil used to set up the sound system in front of the store to test it for dates over the weekend, and he would take a couple of hours or so playing new records. When he’d play, people from the immediate area who wouldn’t normally come out of their homes would come out. Maestro, who is one of the major selectors, actually coined the name Passa Passa because what he saw was people from different areas in West Kingston partying together by default since there was nothing else to go out to. So, Passa Passa really means, “mix up.”