Ken Khouri

Kenneth Lloyd "Ken" Khouri (1917 – 20 September 2003) was a pioneering Jamaican record company owner and one of the first record producers on the island.

He was born in St Catherine Parish, the son of a Lebanese immigrant father and a mother of Cuban origin, and grew up in Richmond and Highgate. He moved to Kingston as a young man and joined the retail company E.A. Issa and Brothers Limited, where he became a manager before leaving to set up his own furniture business.

When his father required specialist hospital treatment, he flew with him to Miami, Florida, and by chance overheard someone selling a disc recording machine. Khouri bought the machine and discs, and returned with it to Kingston, where in 1949 he set up a voice recording service. Realising the commercial possibilities, he diversified into setting up a music recording business, one of his earliest recordings being Lord Flea's "Naughty Little Flea". In 1954, he set up the Times record label with Alec Durie, owner of the Times store in Kingston, and began producing records by local musicians, the first time this had been done in Jamaica. Having until then had records pressed in the US, he also set up a record pressing plant in the early 1950s, and began pressing copies of American records under licence.

Ken Khouri has been described as a pioneer and visionary. According to Lloyd Bradley (in his Bass Culture book), without Khouri the "...new [Jamaican record producing] industry would probably have been stillborn. Ken Khouri was always going to be a central figure: Anyone who had a tune in his head could come to Ken to record it.. ..and get pressed up what ever he thought he could sell." Recording engineer Graeme Goodall said: "If there's one common denominator in the whole thing, not as far as the musical content but as far as the whole process [of developing the Jamaican recording industry], that was Ken Khouri, Papa Khouri. Because he was the one who had the foresight to develop the industry, y'know, build the studio, build the pressing plant. He was a very successful Lebanese businessman, but I mean he was the lynchpin of the whole thing."

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