The BMN label was started by Ronnie Nasralla who was born in to a rich Lebanese family, the name taken from the initials of group names that he was managing at the time, the Blues Busters and the Maytals, with his own at the end, thus BMN. He also ran Sunshine and Soul labels. Ronnie’s aim in music industry was to support a number of artists who had not been treated well by the producers, and gave them half of the profit which was extremely rare compare to then industry standard in Jamaica.



A descendant of a venerable family, Ronnie is related to an American pop singer, Paul Anka, and one of his old friends is Edward Seaga who later became Jamaican Prime Minister. He also went to school with Byron Lee and together they started the Byron Lee and the Dragonaires.



Blessed with lots of talents and long legs, Ronnie started to cut a brilliant figure in show business, dancing, acting, marketing, and sports such as cricket, football, badminton, squash, rackets, tennis, baseball, softball, fencing etc, he also made a great effort for Kingston’s show business scene.



Many people remember him on the cover art of the Byron Lee produces Ska LP and booklet “Dance The Ska”, in which he was lecturing how to dance to Ska in pictures and comments. By the way, the dancing couple is Ronnie and Mrs. Byron Lee, Shiela who is a descendant of Federal Records’ Kouri family.



This project took place as they wanted to show Minister of Culture at the time, Edward Seaga the West Kingston’s Ska scene, so they could possibly get an official Jamaican government promotion for Ska music. Joined by three executives from Atlantic Records, USA, they organized a special dance at the uptown nightclub, Glass Bucket. After that they flew over to States to introduce Jamaican culture, the Ska Dance on TV and famous nightclubs.



The very first James Bond film, “007 Dr. No” was notably shot in Kingston. In this epic, there is a scene where Byron Lee could be seen playing with the band in a nightclub, which was produced by Ronnie himself. Incidentally, he appears as a dancer dancing along the Mule Train’s Count Prince Miller. Ronnie tells a story behind the scene “Then obscure Bob Marley came for the audition. However he didn’t fit the role so we failed him. Ain’t that funny?” It seems he was involved in organizing other scenes apart from this.



Few years later, then-future president Edward Seaga who had a great interest in music launched West Indies Record Limited (WIRL) and sold it to George Benson several years later. However Edward Seaga didn’t own a studio back then, so Ronnie was approached to build one and he did it along with Graham Goodall in the back yard of WIRL. Later on, he sold the whole facilities to Byron Lee and finally, these became Dynamic Sounds, the international studio where everybody from local artists to big names like Rolling Stones recorded.



Ronnie used to sing and play percussions in early years of his musical career, although since bands were constantly on tour and having had a passion for playing sports, he eventually quit being a musician and devoted himself to artist management.



According to Mr. Nasralla, he would never agree with drugs. Toots Hebbert got arrested by possession of marijuana while he was riding a bicycle and ended up in Richmond Farm prison. Ronnie spoke to the administrator of the prison to “conduct a Byron Lee ‘s show in prison and Toots played the guitar and sang there. It was quite fun.” 2 years later when Toots was freed from the prison, Ronnie approached him to record a song that he wrote in prison and suggested him that it should be about his prisoner identification number, 54-46. Toots disagreed because “everybody would know I was in prison” but Mr. Nasralla answered him that “it wouldn’t be a problem because everybody knows it already” and turn him down. They recorded the song at Leslie Kong’s studio and “it was a big hit because I produced it” said Mr. Nasralla.



His main jobs were advertising and marketing, managing many artists. Eventually he established Jamaica Federation of Musicians along with Byron Lee and Sonny Bradshaw, for musicians who worked for long hours without getting any drink or meals supplied at nightclubs and created innovative new rules like setting the working hours to 5 hour maximum with drinks and meals, drafting a contract and paying half of their salary in advance. If there was a nightclub that treated musicians badly, he even stepped in and forced to close the place.



With all these facts, it’s quite reasonable to think that he made a high level of contribution to the music industry with different approach from others.



What he thinks the most important is to save artists who were exploited from other producers. It was clearly seen in himself when we approached him to offer a publishing deal, as he contacted Llans Thelwell whom he hadn’t seen for decades and they came a long way to attend the meeting.



Mr. Nasralla is a great gentleman whom Jamaica must be proud of and he was recently honored as Tribute To The Great. It’s great to know that his contribution has been paid off.



We highly recommend his autobiography.