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Brooklyn-born Roger Steffens wears many hats: actor, author, lecturer, curator, editor, photographer, reggae archivist, broadcaster, director, and producer. His professional radio career began in New York in 1961, and was highlighted by a decade-spanning stint in the 1980s on NPR’s Los Angeles station, KCRW, where he hosted five shows, including the award-winning “Reggae Beat,” which was eventually syndicated to more than 130 stations worldwide for four-and-a-half years during the 1980s.
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He has been acting professionally in films, television, and theater since 1964, and narrated an Oscar-winning documentary, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, in 1978. His voice has been prominently featured in Wag the Dog, Forrest Gump, Ghosts of Mississippi, The American President, Can’t Hardly Wait (as “The Loooove Jock”), and Liberty Heights.
He is also one of the main voices for the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, was the corporate voice for six years for Time-Warner Audio Books (for which he received a recent Audio Book Publishers’ Audie Award nomination for reading Bill Gates’ best-selling book Business @ The Speed of Thought); and has narrated documentaries for the Getty Center, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and scores of other institutions.
But it is in his capacity as one of reggae music’s biggest North American cheerleaders that he is perhaps best known. His Reggae Archives fill six rooms of his home, and contain the world’s largest collection of Bob Marley material. From January to September of 2001, he curated a critically acclaimed 6,000 piece exhibition of his Reggae Archives at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, as well as authoring a 100-page, foot-square exhibit catalog with more than 1,600 illustrations, featuring about a quarter of the exhibits on display.
He lectures internationally on the life of Bob Marley at a variety of venues and has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and television programs. He is coauthor of Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discogrpahy; Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer; One Love: My Life with Bob Marley and the Wailers; and Roger Steffens and Peter Simon’s Reggae Scrapbook. He is also the founding editor of The Beat magazine, the premiere reggae and world beat magazine, for which he edits an annual Bob Marley collectors’ edition.
Roger is the founding editor of one of the Reggae genre's best magazines, The BEAT. He has hosted and participated in hundreds of local, national and international radio and television programs focused on REGGAE and the World Music scene including his own Los Angeles radio show, Reggae Beat. He has been the host for the L.A. Reggae TV show on Century Cable for over ten years and has been a Worldbeat/Reggae columnist for SPIN and BAM magazines. His articles on Bob Marley and Reggae have been featured in Rolling Stone, Musician, Spin, High Times, The NY Times and The Village Voice. Roger has interviewed most of the major names in Reggae including Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and Burning Spear plus dozens of Rock and World Music superstars. When it comes to being on stage to play host to great music, you can find Roger everywhere from MoBay to Miami to Maui.
Irie!!
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