Beres Hammond

Arguably Jamaica’s most beloved living crooner, Beres Hammond got his start fronting one of the island’s first disco-funk bands, Zap Pow, in the ’70s, and supplied the burgeoning dancehall movement with sentimental favorites like “What One Dance Can Do” a decade later. It was during dancehall’s breakthrough early-’90s period, though, that his bourbon-on-the-rocks vocal style truly reached its stride. Hammond draws an appropriately intergenerational crowd to his annual summertime appearances in NYC.