On Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Beres Hammond’s Music Is Life was one of five nominees for Best Reggae Album at the 44th Grammy Awards. The others, per the Recording Academy: Damian Marley’s Halfway Tree, Luciano’s A New Day, Ky-Mani Marley’s Many More Roads and the various-artists set Island Warriors. Halfway Tree won. It was Hammond’s first nomination, twenty-six years after “One Step Ahead.”
The VP years
The road there ran through Queens. After the Elektra experiment of In Control (1994), Hammond’s own Harmony House label settled into a distribution partnership with VP Records that would carry every album he made for the next quarter-century. Love From a Distance (1996) “cemented his status as one of lovers rock’s leading men,” AllMusic writes, and made him “one of the most popular lovers rock artists around”; Getting Stronger (1997, on Heartbeat) and A Day in the Life (1998) followed before he eased his recording pace and let the compilations — Jet Star’s Reggae Max, Forever Yours — keep the shops stocked.
‘Music Is Life’
He returned in 2001 with Music Is Life on VP (VPCD 1624). The album carried “They Gonna Talk,” already a Jamaican hit in 2000; “Rock Away,” his roll-call of the singers who made him; “Ain’t It Good to Know”; and “Dance 4 Me,” a pairing with Wyclef Jean that AllMusic’s review hears as “a near facsimile of Wyclef’s crossover duet with Santana.” Earl “Chinna” Smith and Flourgon contributed. Three tracks — “Ain’t It Good to Know,” “Dusty Road,” “Angel Eyes” — carry co-writing credits to Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, a nod to the Studio One foundations underneath. “One of only a few living reggae legends,” the review calls him, with “the power to transform any listening environment into a contemplative Caribbean getaway.”
Stature
By the turn of the century Hammond had become something rarer than a hitmaker: the artist whose name on a bill sold the tickets. Love Has No Boundaries (2004), with Buju Banton and Big Youth, and A Moment in Time (2008), with “I Feel Good” and “No Goodbye,” kept the run going; the archive’s own stories from the next decade — a 2013 tour with Marcia Griffiths and Morgan Heritage, the One Love, One Life tour — show the demand had not slackened.
Why it matters
The Grammy loss mattered less than the company. In a category the Marley family has dominated, a self-produced album from an independent Jamaican label, distributed by a Jamaican-owned company in New York, stood beside them. A second nomination — for One Love, One Life — would come in 2014.
Listen and dig deeper
- Play Music Is Life, Love From a Distance, A Day in the Life, Love Has No Boundaries and A Moment in Time in the Listen library.
- Previously: ‘Tempted to Touch’ (1990). Next: Order of Jamaica, a second Grammy nod and Dr Beres Hammond (2013–2023).
Sources: Recording Academy — Best Reggae Album, 44th Grammy Awards; Recording Academy — Beres Hammond, awards and nominations; AllMusic — Beres Hammond biography; AllMusic — Music Is Life review and credits; Variety — 44th Grammy winners list (Feb 27, 2002).
Editor’s note: This entry is part of the JamaicansMusic online museum — a career timeline assembled from the archive. It is dated to the events it documents; every claim is drawn from the linked sources.