Category: Reggae

131. JOE GIBBS & THE PROFESSIONALS – AFRICAN DUB ALL-MIGHTY CHAPTER 3 (1978)

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Gibbs had been active in the JA music scene from the early ‘60s, working alongside Lee Perry and Bunny Lee as well as producing rocksteady hits for the likes of The Pioneers, The Heptones and The Ethiopians, but rose to international prominence with his production job on Nicky Thomas’ 1970 global top ten smash ‘Love Of The Common People’. An impressive résumé certainly, but one undoubtedly overshadowed by his ’70s partnership with engineer Errol (ET) Thompson (aka ‘The Mighty Two’) which – with the help of a crack team of session musicians aka The Professionals (Sly & Robbie & co) – delivered over 100 Jamaican chart toppers for a host of singers and DJs including Big Youth, Dennis Brown, Prince Far-I and Black Uhuru. Some of reggae’s most enduring albums such as Two Sevens Clash by Culture also bore his fingerprints, and along with Coxsone and Scratch he rightly competes for the title of greatest reggae producer of all.

However it is his groundbreaking ‘70s experiments in dub which lend his claim to that accolade the greatest weight. In particular his four volume African Dub Almighty series represents dub music at its most revelatory, with the third of those Chapters the pick of the bunch, a rival to King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, Blackboard Jungle Dub and Pick A Dub as perhaps the key album of the genre.

The first two Chapters (from 1973 and 1974 respectively) were pioneering for the time, yet offered little clue as to what would come next. But four years was a long time during what was the most fertile period in reggae’s history, as Kingston rocked to the roots train, basked in the glory of the Wailers’ international success, sweltered while DJs competed for dominance on the street corner sound systems and observed dreadlocks disappear into clouds of ganja smoke as the culture of Rastafari grew more fervent in the wake of Haile Sellassie’s removal as Emperor of Ethiopia.

By the mid-’70s dub had surged forward in its sonic development from the kind of primitive instrumental remixes and edits knocked out by Coxsone and Tubby initially as the most economical way of filling the B-Side of a 45, becoming latterly, far more experimental sonic excursions for increasingly enthusiastic audiences on club nights. Crucially for Gibbs however, in the intervening period (between Chapters Two and Three) he acquired a new 16-track recording studio and record pressing plant at Retirement Crescent. Tubbys by contrast had a mere four tracks and Thompson must have felt like a four year old let loose in a sweetie shop, although the first LP released after the move, State of Emergency, was not an especially significant step forward from Chapter Two – perhaps instead it merely served the purpose of allowing the duo to get their bearings and prepare for what was to come.

Some of the sounds and samples on Chapter Three will be familiar to you if you have at least some interest in reggae and dub music. For instance, the backing track to Jacob Miller’s ‘Baby I Love You So’ has been a much sampled dub staple and along with the echoed skanking guitar, provides the raw material for the album’s title track ‘Chapter Three’. But others almost defy description, so it is vital you give it a proper listen from beginning to end. There’s crazy stuff happening all over the place, not least on the aforementioned title track, where at one point it sounds as if a large grate has been removed from the earth, only to reveal a yawning pelagic catacomb; later in the same track, could that be a double decker bus or another HGV grinding abruptly to a halt?

Lloyd Bradley in his superb history of the genre, Bass Culture, devotes a few pages to ‘Tribesman Rockers’ an otherworldly borrowing of ‘Why Do Birds Follow Spring’ by Alton Ellis, where channels shift and screech over horns, flutes and digital bleeps and squeals which sound like they’ve come from some futuristic arcade game.

For good measure, leavened into the mix on ‘Freedom Call Dub’ are some Clangers-style recorder and insanely distorted UFO sound effects, while the guitar groove on ‘Jubilation Dub’ seems to tailspin off the edge of a cliff beneath some seriously phat bass, the whole thing descending into anarchy, the dial grips on that mixing desk having a house party to themselves. Elsewhere, door bells ring, sirens blare and water pools bubble and froth. One’s head begins to melt.

Best of all is ‘Angolian Chant’ – a heavyweight twist on Dennis Brown’s gorgeous ‘Love Me Always’ reinterpreted as “I wanna dub you, dub you always” – with the sustain on Brown’s “wooh-ooh-ooh-ooh” a stroke of genius, the work of a master engineer, one who understands how to fasten divergent musical fragments together, drape silent shrouds over familiar rhythms and brush and polish others until they gleam anew, radically reinventing with echo, splice and overdub.

Lloyd Bradley identifies parallels between dub and the African beliefs and practices which migrated to Jamaica known as obeah, which divides the body into seven centres or selves (eg digestive system, respiratory system, the brain) and prescribes herbs and potions in order to bring forward, push back or heal and realign those different aspects. Bradley noted how the best dub contains those medicinal even magical qualities, excavating, transfiguring, purifying, shredding, even amputating where necessary. African Dub All-Mighty Chapter Three delivers on all of those fronts, in addition to being one of the most authentically psychedelic records ever created. The likes of Scientist, Dub Syndicate and African Head Charge would rewrite the dub rule book, psyching into the FX and detaching it more and more from its roots. By contrast, the music of Gibbs, Thompson and the Professionals was steeped in reggae’s rich heritage. It holds body and soul, past and future, earth and the cosmos in perfect balance. (JJ)

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74. THE UPSETTERS – RETURN OF THE SUPER APE (1978)

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Last Art of The Black Ark 

 He had to show the others he was the greatest. The wisest. The master. He would confound them. Outfox them. They might have had the better equipment at their disposal: their spanking new 16 track mixing consoles. Top of the range. But they didn’t have the secret. That was God-given. They just wanted to get their records out there, and watch the money roll in. They didn’t have the soul for it. Or the knowledge. The sleight of hand. Those ghostly fingerprints. The supple imagination. The fearlessness. They would fail. He would surely triumph. Jah would make it be. Lee Perry. The Upsetter. Scratch. He gave the world Bob Marley and they pinched his protégé from under his nose. “Money talks”, he said. He invented dub, but the credit went to Tubby and the others. Rainford Hugh Perry had a few scores to settle. He wasn’t going to lose ground to Tubby, ‘Striker’, The Mighty Two, Coxsone, not anyone. Not anymore. And he wasn’t going to let Chris Blackwell’s opportunism finish him off. He was going to make music that would bewitch and mystify the world, create sounds beyond their reach. And so he did.

It is the work Perry produced in his legendary home-made studio in Kingston, The Black Ark, which contains the greatest treasures of his prodigious output. Selecting a Black Ark Perry production for TNPC is not a simple task. Be as well doing it blindfolded with a yad. There’s that much good stuff to choose from. In between producing monumental reggae masterpieces such as Junior Murvin’s ‘Police & Thieves’, Max Romeo’s ‘War Ina Babylon’ and the staggering ‘Heart Of The Congos’ (to these ears the greatest reggae album ever made), not to mention engineering Dr. Alimantado’s classic ‘Best Dressed Chicken’ and taking time out to oversee The Clash’s ‘Complete Control’, Lee was doing his utmost to strip James Brown of his title of ‘hardest working man in show-business’, by simultaneously taking centre stage for a series of dazzling albums of his own. 

Of these, ordinarily it is ‘Super Ape’ from 1976 which gets top billing. ‘Return Of The Super Ape’, the last album Perry cut at The Black Ark before he burnt the studio to the ground, isn’t held in quite the same high regard. But in some ways it outshines its more illustrious older sibling, although any analysis of their relative merits might depend upon what it is you like most about Lee Perry’s music. Compare the lean, scrawny rabid-looking creature on the sleeve of ‘Return Of The Super Ape’ to the fearsome powerhouse with the more formidable BMI of the original. The sleeve paintings certainly provide us with a clue. ‘Super Ape’ is a robust, reverb-drenched masterpiece, the production sure and confident. It’s a heady mix, bearing a more homogenous and cohesive sound than ‘The Return’ which, by contrast, is one of those Perry albums that sounds thrown together almost as an afterthought, a sonic accident of raw impenetrable dubs, flippant singalongs and spectral passages shrouded in mystery. It could easily be mistaken for a collection of cast-offs from ‘Super Ape’ but it is so much more than that. The production is more varied, even if the mastering appears lopsided at times, like the sound of warped vinyl under a worn stylus. In other words, it is exactly the kind of Lee Perry album I love.

Just how did he conjure those sounds? And from a primitive 4 track recorder. Well, magicians never reveal their secrets, but others have documented some extremely bizarre techniques and rituals at The Black Ark. Scratch would often carry out invocations, summoning the spirit of Jah by blowing ganja smoke over the tapes, spattering them with blood and urine, even burying them in corners of the studio gardens to protect them. He ran chicken wire around his drum booth and buried microphones under a palm tree, which he thumped to obtain that echoed bass drum effect. For good measure he added bells, screams, wails and cows mooing (apparently Watty Burnett’s baritone through a foil covered cardboard tube). There’s simply no-one else who went to such lengths to create their own unique sound. And here on ‘The Return Of The Super Ape’, we get the full range.

Take for example the title track, a patchwork quilt of unearthliness which for the most part doesn’t really travel anywhere, but with Merlin at the mixing desk we are treated to a banquet of special effects – what sounds like a few magazines of machine gun rounds being rapidly discharged, bottles breaking, rubbery jungle reverb, moody sax buried low in the mix with Lee’s echoey (largely indecipherable) utterances, which stand in stark contrast to the crisp polished drum sound. The bass stays low, the bells jangle and the whole thing uncoils for a bumper dubby finale. Majestic. Elsewhere we have ‘Dyon Anaswa’ – a playful bass driven skank with curly guitar licks courtesy Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith, and the mischievous ‘Tell Me Something Good’, one of Lee’s iriest little rollers. Horns are almost choked out on the imbecilic but irresistibly funky ‘Huzza a Hana’ and ‘Psyche & Trim’ is a prowling slice of righteous serpentine soul.

The greatest magic is to be found on ‘Bird In Hand’ – if the introduction was nicked from a 1950s Bollywood movie, yet it still somehow sounds like a mystical conference with Jah, a genuinely holy sound. ‘Crab Yars’ which follows, remains one of Scratch’s most perfectly realised instrumentals – a joyous, sweltering intoxicating reverb drenched groove which you don’t want to end. The music and production are here completely harmonious – to borrow a title from Augustus Pablo, it’s infectious exuberance sounds like genuinely ‘upfull living’. The finale ‘High Ranking Sammy’, is one of those Perry tracks which sounds like he was completely stewed doing the mastering – it has drop outs, slows down, speeds up – or is that just my pressing? Here, there’s a nod to another Perry masterclass – Junior Murvin’s epic ‘Crossover’. It is mindbendingly brilliant.

Coxsone Dodd, King Tubby, Joe Gibbs and all the rest – they would have their day, but between the years 1973 and 1979 Perry outshone them all with a catalogue of releases unrivalled in reggae’s history. Can we speak of Lee Perry as producer in the same breath as Joe Meek, Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Eno, Quincy Jones etc? Most certainly. He delivered a body of work which puts him in the same league as those household names, the greatest record producers in popular music. Indeed, the case could be made that Lee Perry was more original, more sonically adventurous than any of them. And ‘Return Of The Super Ape’, the last album he recorded at The Black Ark, is a fitting epilogue, the consummation of his most fertile period of inventiveness. Haunted by paranoia and convinced that the studio had been cursed by the presence of evil spirits, he torched it. As if he himself understood the spell had been broken, he came back in 1980 as ‘Pipecock Jackxon’ and while he continued to make some wonderful music, there was nothing that quite matched the glories of the music he created at The Black Ark. (JJ)

50. LIVE – BURNING SPEAR (1977)

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LIVE – BURNING SPEAR (1977)
I’ve never been to a reggae gig. They’re comparatively rare in Scotland and, despite the odd historic flirtation with the genre, Elvis Costello can hardly be said to count, so I have to content myself with some of the most incendiary live albums of any kind: The Wailers from the Lyceum in 1975 (over-familiarity notwithstanding); Misty In Roots at the Counter Eurovision, and this one.
For all the majesty of the studio-bound dub sorcery that was being cast by Lee Perry, Joe Gibbs and the rest by the mid-’70s, reggae’s essence remained in its performance and you can hear the roof being torn off on these albums, and see as well as hear the alfresco splintering in the numerous Reggae Sunsplash films produced over the years.
With this scalding performance by Burning Spear, captured at the   Rainbow in Finsbury Park, north London (a venue steeped in late ’70s music lore) Island chief Chris Blackwell  might have had justifiable reason to believe that Marley’s crossover success would be replicated. A similarly scintillating London performance, a similarly red, green and yellow (gold was tricky to reproduce) ‘live’ logo , a similarly exultant onstage pose struck on the cover by Winston Rodney. Not so commercially but musically…
Marcus Garvey strides off from the starting blocks on one of the mightiest riffs in all reggae which reminds you that Rodney (he is Spear and Spear is him) is a master of the deep-striking pop hook – see Tradition on Marcus Garvey (the album) and Columbus on Hail HIM for further evidence. It mainly comes courtesy of Aswad, then, along with Misty, Matumbi and Steel Pulse, in the vanguard of the first wave of British reggae and a full decade away from their number one with  featherweight soft metal cover Don’t Turn Around.
But the song carries real weight – the titular Garvey, a political and trade union activist of the early 20th century, is revered as one of Rastafarianism’s most important prophets, not only for his fostering of a truly international black consciousness, and of the admittedly contentious ‘back to Africa’ movement, but also for his declaration that the crowning of a black king in Africa would herald the “day of deliverance” – widely held to be a prophecy of Haile Selassie’s emergence as Emperor of Ethiopia.
But imprisonment, deportation and an obscure, impoverished death in London in 1940 followed for Garvey. By the 1970s, his reputation in Jamaica was secure but on Old Marcus Garvey, it’s those years of oblivion that Rodney seems to be lamenting, as he repeats “no one remember Old Marcus Garvey” while countering it with a roll call of other heroes of Jamaican history. And he really is lamenting – as the sombre rhythms roll, he genuinely sounds like he’s bursting into tears over this  negligence – I wasn’t there and there doesn’t seem to be any footage but it sounds pretty real to me and he doesn’t stop weeping even as the music ends. This level of intensity, you feel, is what the NME’s Chris Salewicz was getting at when, in a quote boldly pulled out for the album’s advery, he pronounced it “the most awe-inspiring show I’ve seen in a long, long time.”

There’s more unorthodox vocalising on Man In The Hills. To a lissom, intoxicating rhythm, Rodney extols the Rastafarian practice of communal living in the Blue Mountains above Kingston (a theme he would soon revisit on the superb Social Living) and brings the nature of rural Jamaica to the sprawl of north London with an exuberant blast of birdsong.
Such is the supercharged cauldron of this music that even the lyrically grim Slavery Days gives rise to a call-and-response, that’s invigorating where these things are so often corny. “Do you remember the days of slavery? Do you? Do you?” Demands Rodney. Each time the answer comes back “yeah!” Thankfully,  the answer is really no but, as with the Holocaust, remembering here means not allowing to be forgotten. Now, of course, we know slavery has never gone away, though the notion of “modern slavery” is a grotesque paradox. Modern signifies progress, refinement, enhancement; slavery is, by definition, primitive, barely evolved. Remember.
But this is the mark of protest music at its most potent, music and message hitting feet, hips, head and heart simultaneously and with equal force. If the question “do you feel irie?” at the start of Lion elicits a negative response, better check for a pulse (PG).

19. THE CONGOS – HEART OF THE CONGOS (1977)

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Even by the highly spiritual standards of ’70s reggae, Heart of the Congos is a record drenched in soul. Like most roots reggae, it tells of incalculable pain – the inhuman slavery which dragged ancestors from their homes, the alienation and displacement of the here and now and the brutalising poverty of the ‘sufferahs’, to say nothing of the prejudice faced by those who found themselves in the ‘wrong’ place.
Yet it’s also saturated with hope and redemption, drawn from the deepest and most heartfelt convictions. There are those who are only able to rationalise faith (or, if you will, belief system) by caricaturing it but to do so underestimates its complexity and potency – for those who feel it most sincerely, it means everything.
And the sincerity heard on Heart of the Congos is as profound as it gets. Each of its 10 songs is woven from three elements: lyrics recasting the Bible in a Rastafarian setting, bringing comfort, intercession and grave warning in equal measure; the dizzying harmonies, with Cedric Myton’s stratospheric tenor anchored by Roy Johnson’s steadfast tenor, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s magisterial production, which paints the haze of a Jamaican summer where spiritual tranquility is being pursued but threat and privation are never far away. Aptly, this particular trinity forms an indivisible whole.
Fisherman, the opener and best-known song, depicts the toil of those whom the “hungry-belly pickney…millions of them” rely upon for survival, to a rhythm which, like most of the album, is brisk but not needlessly hurried.  Congoman, meanwhile, sounds like it has the entire population of Kingston on percussion – polyrhythmic doesn’t even begin to cover it – as they yearn for a return to Africa, a theme developed on the following Open Up The Gate, which may well have the most entrancing intro reggae has ever produced.
The scriptural message is as stern as the melodies are solemn on Can’t Come In (“You’ve got to be clean…the door is locked on you”) and on Sodom and Gomorrow (sic), but they’re not averse to punning – you’ll hear the ‘j’ pronounced with relish in “hallelujah” and the invocation “Jah-Jah- judgement come.” I have to admit that I find a couple of the songs tough to listen to because the emotion is so overwhelming – you’d
expect nothing less from a song called Children Crying, while the fear they feel for the pious and the sanctimonious on The Wrong Thing is palpable.
If all this seems too weighty, the downright beauty of the songs triumphs every time, nowhere more so than on the closing Solid Foundation. The harmonies swoop from the highest to the lowest in the space of a few breaths, while the music is the dubbiest and most languid of the whole album – listen to the few seconds at 3:08 where the drums drop out to let Scratch make the sun rise; power has never sounded so gentle.
Heart of the Congos has lived through several cycles. It was patchily available in the UK through the now lost art of import but John Peel was offering access to it by 1978. Three years later, the Beat licensed it to be issued on their Go-Feet label, shamelessly billing it a ‘gold spinner’ for what was even then the bargain price of £2.99 – it was at this time that I got to know it, for free, thanks to my ever-bountiful local library. Although Fisherman – the only song I’d heard previously – suspiciously seemed a minute or so shorter than the version Peel had been playing, I fell hard and fast for the whole thing and it became the unlikely soundtrack to spring in a Glasgow suburb.
In the late ’90s, it received a similarly sensitive reissue on Mick Hucknall’s Blood and Fire imprint, all of which makes it both baffling and irritating that the Congos’ Spotify profile asserts the album was subjected for years to “crappy reissues.”
But this is irrelevant – you could issue Heart of the Congos in chip wrapper festooned with whelks and the strangeness, compassion and outright glory of its music would be undimmed (PG).

14. DADAWAH – PEACE & LOVE (1974)

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Ras Michael’s Peace & Love is both a devotional reggae album and a work of great artistic beauty. It transcends the reggae genre musically with its instrumentation more akin to the Temptations’ social consciousness recordings of the early 70’s or even Isaac Hayes’ extended mood pieces from the same time. Think ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’ or the piano riff from Hayes’ Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’.

Peace and Love was released in 1974 on Trojan, a label famed for its prolific output of punchy 3 minute ska and rocksteady singles. Not so here: 4 songs stretched out over two sides, hardly a money spinner for the label. Michael’s masterpiece isn’t even referenced in Lloyd Bradley’s otherwise magnificently definitive history of reggae ‘Bass Culture’. Perhaps Bradley doesn’t consider it a reggae album at all. Indeed it dispenses altogether with the classic reggae guitar/piano offbeat rhythms. Instead Willie Lindo’s understated guitar licks wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dylan or Van album from the same period. They drift in and out of the spacious sound, while the burning embers of the Nyabinghi-inspired rhythm section provides an inspired hypnotic backing groove to an album bursting at the seams with Michael’s righteous proclamations of Rastafari.

The purists may scoff – and perhaps this is why the profile of the album is so low – but this is genuinely a spine tingling groundbreaking and genre-hopping high point of Jamaican music, up there with Heart of The Congos or East of The River Nile. Listen to Seventy-Two Nations and go out and make some new disciples. (JJ)