Reggae music has been recognised by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
It's about time they did. I have loved reggae music since June 1978 when I first heard King
Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown by the wonderfully named Augustus Pablo. I first heard this legendary track on
an Island Records limited edition 12" single. The track is 2' 30" of pure thunder and lightening, not just pure Jamaican reggae, but one of the most stunning Jamaican dub
reggae tracks of all time.
――•――
The Jamaican electronic and sound engineer Osbourne Ruddock
(1941-1989), was born and raised on High Holborn Street, which is close to the
harbour in Kingston Jamaica. As a teenager, Ruddock began studying electronics
through American correspondence courses and at the College of Arts, Science and
Technology in Kingston. After leaving college he set up a radio repair shop in
Kingston, and from his repair work he began to take an interest in repairing
and making electronic equipment and amplifiers for local recording studios and
sound systems. Ruddock was technically gifted as an electronics engineer: in
1961 he built his own radio transmitter, from which he briefly broadcast a
pirate radio station.
Throughout the 1960s, Ruddock built a reputation as an
electronics engineer, a sound-system operator, and a remixer of vocal reggae
tracks. By 1971, he had converted the front room of his house on Dromilly
Avenue, Kingston, into a recording and remix studio, and had begun releasing
re-worked versions of vocal reggae tracks under his stage-name of King Tubby.
Within this modest physical space, King Tubby taught himself
how to play his studio as a musical instrument. He explored how his analogue
mixing deck, sound effects and tape recorder could be used to strip away the
original structure of a reggae vocal track, leaving fragments of the original
vocals, keyboards or horns, and emphasising the percussive drive of the drums
and the thunder of the original bass line. This process stripped back the
layers of a song’s body, to leave exposed both the skeleton and viscera of the
track. Through a painstaking process of
musical prosection, King Tubby helped to create dub reggae. Much of what is now
known as remix culture in modern music can be traced back to the sonic
inventiveness of Ruddock: playing with tape delay, high and low pass filters,
echo, reverb, phasing, and modulation, in his home-made studio in Dromilly
Avenue, Kingston.
Some of Ruddock's most distinctive albums are collaborations
with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Augustus Pablo (1953-1999). Pablo
was born Horace Swaby, in the middle-class Havendale district of Kingston,
Jamaica. He attended Kingston College as a teenager, where he learned to play
piano. By the late 1960's, Swaby had become a committed Rastafarian and had
begun working as a session musician for the Randy's Studio house band. In 1969
he began playing melodica - a small, cheap, mouth blown keyboard that was made
for teaching children basic keyboard skills. He released his first instrumental
tracks in the early 1970s under the pseudonym Augustus Pablo, and from then
until his early death in 1999, he produced hundreds of vocalists, and released
a string of haunting reggae instrumental albums featuring his trademark Far
East sound, based on minor key melodica motifs.
The collaboration between King Tubby and Augustus Pablo is
exemplified in the album King Tubbys
meets Rockers Uptown, which was first released on the Yard label in
Kingston in 1976, though individual tracks had been released slightly earlier
as singles. This is a foundational record in the development of Jamaican music.
It is considered by many experts to be one of the greatest of all dub reggae
albums. By construction, each of the 11 short tracks on the album is a radical
re-working of an original vocal track. The combined talents of King Tubby and
Augustus Pablo mean that not only were the original vocal tracks stripped back,
but new rhythms were created by King Tubby through echo and reverb, and subtle
shifts in mood were created by Pablo. This music has had a profound influence
on modern music, as much for the remix approach it took to re-working an
existing musical track in an inventive way than through musical similarity.
Tubby built his studio using mixing desks that were
discarded and considered obsolete by Federal recording studio. He modified
these decks by adding unique electronic circuitry of his own design, and then
he and his collaborators ET and Lee Perry, explored the outer edges of what
this relatively modest technology was able to do. Pablo did the same with the
low-tech melodica keyboard. Tubby did not record musicians. He took
pre-recorded musical tracks and added vocals and some over dubbed music - such
as the melodica motifs of Pablo. He pushed to the outer limits the capability
of the recording technology he had at his disposal.
The writer Michael Veal has written a detailed, informed and
serious history of the different threads of Jamaican culture and music that led
to dub reggae. In this history, he notes that the way basic studio recording
technology was used by people like King Tubby led to a fundamental change in
Jamaican music:
At this stage… recording technology was beginning to imply for reggae what improvisation had already implied for jazz: the notion that a ‘composition’ must now be understood as a composite of its endlessly multiplying, mutating, and potentially infinite elaborations over time.
