Thursday, July 20, 2017

Music: From "Scratch" to "Tubby" Adventures in Dub

On a balmy late May evening under the stars at Chris Blackwell’s stunning cliffside hotel The Caves in Negril, Jamaica, legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry strolls up to the DJ booth and takes the microphone.
For the next 45 minutes Scratch, now 81, his hair and beard dyed cherry-red, freestyles lyrics as DJ (or selector, in Jamaican parlance). Kingston Dub Club owner Gabre Selassie tweaks his mixing console’s controls, manipulating the riddim track, transforming the bass line into a recurring thunderous boom.
The event, part of the inaugural Tmrw.Tday Festival, was called The Dub Cave, nodding to the musical art form Perry helped define. Dub refers to rearranging elements within an existing recording through the isolation of individual instrumental tracks with the addition of various effects to create a new work.
Scratch’s experimentation at the mixing board, particularly at his fabled Black Ark studio in the '70s, established him as one of the most creative forces in dub. Alongside other visionaries who conducted experiments in their respective studios and on the sound systems that played the music, they created dub, which rose to prominence in Jamaica and internationally during the 1970s.
“Dubbing is a traditional Jamaican sound system vibe; if you go to a dancehall sound system [session] they take out the bass and drop it in as an artist is performing, but they are not dubbing as we would do it. We turn on the bass, turn up the knobs, keeping the craft a little more intricate,” comments Gabre Selassie, whose thoughtfully curated playlist of traditional Rastafarian Nyabinghi chants, classic Jamaican tracks, contemporary roots reggae and powerful dub mixes is heard each Sunday evening at the Kingston Dub Club, located in the hills overlooking the capital city.
“There are different approaches to dubbing,” continues Gabre, who operates the Rockers Sound Station [sound system] started by his mentor, the late producer/musician Augustus Pablo, another pivotal figure in dub’s development. “For example King Jammy [born Lloyd James] tours the world doing live mixes of his own productions; because he produced the song, he has each instrument recorded separately so he can get more detailed in his mixes; I take the actual recorded material as played on a CD, 7-inch or album track and do what mixes I can, so I do dub mixes as if on a sound system, he does mixes as if in the studio.”
When digital reggae came to the fore in the mid-1980s, dub’s popularity diminished in Jamaica; currently, dub is enjoying a renaissance on the island and beyond its shores, whether it’s live dubbing performances in clubs and at music festivals or the rediscovery of classic dub albums by the genre’s forefathers including Scratch, Pablo, Hopeton “Scientist” Brown, Neil “Mad Professor” Fraser, and the man widely credited as dub’s originator, the late Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock.
“Dub is a part of Jamaican music’s foundation but needs to be pushed further by the music industry here; next year we plan to involve more of dub’s global players,” comments Kevin Bourke, a co-founder of the Tmrw.Tday Festival, held May 17-23 in Negril. “Dub in its truest form breaks down music then redelivers it in a raw, impactful way, which Gabre did at the Dub Cave and [producer] Teflon Zinc Fence [responsible for reggae star Chronixx’s early hits “Behind Curtain” and “Warrior”] did as our resident dub selector,” says Bourke. “It was amazing to have Scratch, one of dub’s godfathers, perform at the Dub Cave, passing the proverbial torch to the current generation who are carrying on the mission.”
The original practitioners established dub not just as a distinctive reggae offshoot but as a prototype for modern electronic music and its associated practices, including the song remix and the elevation of the producer and/or engineer as the artist.
“Dub’s development revolutionized the entire music business, as we see today, and the creativity and spontaneity in my dad’s recordings are pillars of Jamaican music; some go back almost 50 years, which put him at the forefront of dub,” comments Addis Pablo, son of Augustus Pablo, who introduced the melodica to reggae in the early '70s and produced numerous groundbreaking instrumental/dub albums including East of the River Nile and King Tubby’s Meets Rockers Uptown, ranked among the finest dub albums ever made.

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