JAZZ ON CD: Gwen Ansell
In the beginning was the word. And long before slack, ragga, rap and hip-hop, the word was dub. As Jamaican music emerged from mento, rock-steady and ska in the 1970s, a new kind of artist was born.
A whole generation of producers and DJs took advantage of increasingly sophisticated (but still pre-digital) desks to mix up a storm of booms and fades, reverb, echo and voice-over. Jamaican vocal singles were produced with an instrumental — sometimes just rhythm — B side, over which the DJ could preach: the dub track.
The era has been superbly documented by the Blood and Fire label, founded four years ago in Manchester. Its begetters included a heavy contingent from the band Simply Red (Mick Hucknall is a partner) and veteran Jamaican music historian and producer Steve Barrow. And now independent black music distributor Revolver is handling the Blood and Fire label for South Africa.
Names on the label (around 18 titles currently available) include King Tubby, Lee, “Scratch” Perry and Tappa Zukie. On the latest sampler, Heavyweight II, other show up.
The album starts out with customs clerk Roy Samuel Reid — better known as the legendary I-Roy — chanting and declaiming over some beautiful sax works from the Skatalites’s Tommy McCook on the 1972 Sidewalk Killer — and it just gets better and better, with tracks by Jah Stitch, King Tubby and some rare alternate cuts of The Congos.
There’s also one short track by Scientist (the label has issued a whole album of his early work). Scientist was the innovator of the style, with an eerie premonitory musical vision that foreshadowed the electronic sounds of today.
I-Roy is represented as well by his own collection Don’t Check With No Lightweight Stuff: 45 minutes of social comment, herbal advice, outrageous hubris and film criticism — this last on the classic track Buck and the Preacher.
Vocal duo The Congos get three-star treatment on the boxed double Hearty of the Congos. Like all the Blood and Fire albums, this is a superb production, with a booklet of edgy, symbolic artwork and genuinely informative liner interviews that let the artists discuss their context and motivation. If you don’t know them, The Congos share some stylistic common ground with early Bob Marley: stark, almost folk- like Rastafarian lyrics — in this case made hauntingly beautiful by Cedric Myton’s falsetto embroideries.
When I lived in Brixton (the South London one), my Saturday nights were spent looking for good blues parties.
With Lloyd and Girlene, we’d pound the pavements, ears scanning the sounds spraying from open windows. The merest hint
of calypso would damn the event with a
disparaging “small island!” But when we heard I-Roy, we knew we’d found our blues. Bredren and sistren, wherever you are today, these albums made me miss you.
If you have trouble finding Blood and Fire albums in the shops, call Revolver head office on (0351) 92-2196/7 for a catalogue and order details