The Chin family helping to spin reggae’s evolution

Every day dozens of FedEx boxes packed with 7-inch vinyl singles by hopeful Jamaican reggae artists pour into the Queens warehouse of VP Records, run by the Chin family. Over the last 25 years, Vincent and Pat Chin, their four children and now an assortment of grandchildren have been an important link between reggae and New York.

Now the Chins are on the brink of something big. Media requests for interviews are also pouring in every day. Various Chins are photographed in this month’s GQ magazine, even Chris, the shy son who had to be chased around the warehouse before he would sit for the picture. The company phone rings relentlessly. “Chris, line one. Randy, line two. Is Miss Pat around?” an operator beckons. Two weeks ago VP, a boutique in a universe of recording giants, signed a multimillion-dollar partnership with one of the behemoths, Atlantic Records. Some are comparing it to Columbia’s 1985 marriage with Russell Simmons’ hip-hop powerhouse Def Jam Records.

But this is not a story of another industry deal. This is about a family that came to New York but never really left Jamaica; they lived in both cultures and built their business with the best of both worlds. In other words, this is the classic immigrant saga, updated.

By running a business connected to the homeland and regularly returning to Kingston, the Chins helped keep Jamaica’s reggae alive since Bob Marley made it an international sound in the 1970s. And as that sound has faded, the Chins have helped popularize an up-tempo strain of the music known as dancehall.

How it began

Vincent Chin broke into the music business 40 years ago selling old jukebox records in Kingston. He and his wife, Pat, opened a record store and then expanded into producing Jamaican music under the label Randy’s Records. Marley and lesser-known stars regularly passed through their studio.

In 1977, Vincent and his two oldest sons, Clive and Chris, came to New York to move the family and the business, renamed VP Records. Political unrest had driven them and many others from the Caribbean to seek a better life. But they were as good for New York as New York was for them. It was the arrival of the Chins and a million other immigrants from all over the world that turned around the city, which had just survived a brush with bankruptcy and was hemorrhaging residents to the suburbs.

By 1980, Pat also moved, with the two younger children, Randy and Angela, to Jamaica, Queens. “I wish we could say it was a marketing strategy to go from Jamaica to Jamaica,” says Randy, “but it was a coincidence.”

Here, the Chins had to persuade an industry that equated reggae with Marley and only Marley (or maybe Peter Tosh) that a family of Chinese-West Indian-Irish descent knew the loping music of the islands. Certainly, they did not look the part. “My grandchildren have so much different blood in them they hardly look like each other, never mind other Jamaicans,” says Miss Pat, as the tiny matriarch is known.

Over time, the Chins and VP Records became widely known in the mom-and-pop record shops and dance clubs and radio stations around New York’s Caribbean neighborhoods. (Nearly 10% of Jamaica’s population -- 213,805 people -- left in the 1980s; most moved to New York.) They produced major acts such as Shaggy, Super Cat, Shabba Ranks and Beenie Man, as well as annual best-of-reggae albums. “The music didn’t leave Jamaica, but the family here made our music bigger and wider and helped us find new regions,” says saxophonist Dean Fraser, a reggae graybeard visiting VP’s warehouse last week to work on a production deal.

On any given day, the Chin family can be found in a sprawling warehouse that abuts a McDonalds on (where else?) Jamaica Avenue. In one cramped office, Joel, Clive’s son, is listening to a CD recorded by an up-and-coming dancehall act. Wearing a backward cap, Joel, who is 26 and generously proportioned, rolls with the beat. He’s got the ear, so he scouts the talent, traveling to Jamaica almost monthly.

A floor above, Randy, who is 40 and Joel’s MBA uncle, is meeting with the sales and marketing staff. He is wearing a Ralph Lauren denim shirt. After working in California for a decade as an engineer in the aerospace industry, he came back to the family business. He negotiated the deal with Atlantic.

Chris, 43, Randy’s gangly, elusive older brother, wanders the warrens of the warehouse quietly talking, sometimes in patois, to producers, artists and the young promotion team. He has the important role of hand-holder with the artists. He’s also a peacemaker in a family that, like all families, often needs one.

Vincent, the patriarch, has retired in Miami, where his youngest child, Angela, 38, runs a VP distribution center. Various other grandchildren and in-laws also come around with opinions.

But the biggest opinionator is Miss Pat, who is 65. She says, “I’m just here to support everyone.”

Randy says otherwise: “She weighs in on everything.”

Mostly Miss Pat, who is supposedly semi-retired, works at VP’s record store a few miles away. But she regularly sweeps into the warehouse carrying plastic bags filled with CDs and cookie tins.

She cooks lunch -- last week it was curried shrimp and rice -- for Randy, Chris, Joel and the staff and tries to get them all to eat together in the lunchroom.

This is often futile. The Chins are always moving in different directions. Except when they come together to make the business work.

Those who left

While Chris and Miss Pat spent their early years here developing hot acts, some left VP for major labels or just lost steam. Beenie Man, for example, left two years ago for Virgin Records. But with Randy’s business acumen and Joel’s ear for new artists, VP has been trying to serve the talent better and remain relevant to younger audiences.

“Chris and I took the business as far we could, but now Randy and Joel are lifting it to a new level,” Miss Pat says.

A few years ago, Joel was on one of his regular scouting trips to Jamaica when he hooked up with Sean Paul, a handsome young dancehall singer. That was a turning point for VP.

Sean Paul now has a single, “Gimme the Light,” at No. 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Hot Rap Tracks chart. The success of his hip-hop-flavored reggae was the catalyst for VP’s new partnership with Atlantic.

The Chins are eager to bring a new style of reggae music to the mainstream but keep it authentic in the process. They have done this as a family: Even while they are full-fledged New Yorkers -- living in single-family houses on Long Island, sending their kids to public schools and driving minivans -- their Jamaican roots remain strong. The second generation has all married Jamaicans, mostly of Chinese descent. And the company Christmas party is already planned this year -- at a Jamaican restaurant in Manhattan.