peThe Jamaica Gleaner reports, “For almost 20 years, Peggy Quattro criss-crossed the world gathering news for her magazine Reggae Report. Now, she is looking to share the publication’s catalogue by establishing a cyber-archive.”

Quattro recently launched the Reggae Report Archive Project and hopes that people can pledge financial support through KIckstarter to help get the archives on the Internet. As an incentive, she is offering a range of prizes which include a founding member certificate, vintage T-shirts and posters, Bob Marley art, CDs and DVDs. She explains, “The objective of the Kickstarter archive project is to raise the funds to create a home worthy of all this information. This is reggae history. This is authentic information from the root.”

Quattro started Reggae Report as a newsletter in 1983 with Mikey Zappow. It expanded to a quarterly magazine that covered the international reggae scene, world beat music from Europe and Africa, and the latest in soca. The magazine was last published in 1998. Quattro produced 124 issues of the Reggae Report, featuring “hundreds upon hundreds of articles, interviews, reviews and world news.”

Born in Ohio, Quattro lived for 7 years in Europe, where she first fell in love with reggae. In a 2010 interview, she says, “In 1976, while living in Nϋrnberg, Germany, my friends played Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Harder They Come’ and followed with some Bob Marley music, who was touring Germany at the time.  I fell in love with the rhythm, the message, and never looked back.” She got involved with Jamaican music professionally while living in Miami in the early 1980s; she was then an assistant to Don Taylor, former manager of Bob Marley.

Reggae Report grew considerably, especially in the 1990s when dancehall became popular in the United States. The US was the publication’s largest market, followed by Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Canada and France. Its best sellers, says Quattro, were its theme issues, such as the Bob Marley tribute issues, Peter Tosh tributes, “Dancehall Rules,” and “Women in Reggae.” She stresses that many of the issues explore topics that are still relevant today.

For full article, see http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110522/arts/arts3.html

For more information, see http://www.reggaereport.com/

Read the interview with Quattro at http://www.jamaicans.com/music/interviews/interviewmpeggyquattrofreggaereport.shtml